More What If?: Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been?
Many armchair historians have spent hours daydreaming of what might have  been if some turning point in history had gone another way. The appeal of theWhat If?books is that editor Robert Cowley gets professional historians  to concentrate on these imaginative questions. Thefirst volumefocused entirely on  military matters;What If? 2leans heavily but not exclusively in that  direction. Victor Davis Hanson wonders about the consequences for Western  philosophy if Socrates had died in battle, Thomas Fleming ponders a Napoleonic  invasion of North America, and Caleb Carr argues the Second World War lasted  longer than it should have because George Patton's superiors restrained their  energetic general. More than two dozen contributors offer bold speculation: If  the Chinese had committed themselves to ocean exploration, asks Theodore F. Cook  Jr., might they have discovered the New World and even prevented "the worst  horrors of the Atlantic Slave Trade [by halting] Portuguese expansion along the  African coast at this early date?" Other times they are pleasantly modest: In  one of the book's best sections, John Lukacs describes the fantasy of Teddy  Roosevelt defeating Woodrow Wilson in the 1912 election--and decides the long- term effects would not have been great. Like its predecessor,What If? 2is delicious mind candy for readers willing to believe there's nothing  inevitable about what has come before us.--John Miller--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.