Curious Scotland: Tales from a Hidden History

This fun book makes no claim to scholarly rigor, but is instead "an autodidact's anthology of neglected episodes in Scottish history." The stories were chosen, Rosie says, according to just one principle: "Really? How interesting! I never knew." And so Rosie, a Scottish journalist, playwright and television documentary maker, takes us on a diverting tour, down the short cuts, bypasses and cul-de-sacs of history rather than its highways, from the time of King Arthur to the present. A flavor of what Rosie offers is hinted at in his chapter titles, which include "The Glasgow Frankenstein" (about an 1818 medical experiment to resurrect a hanged man); "The Blasphemer" (about Thomas Aikenhead, the last man to be executed in Scotland, in 1697, for that crime); and "Operation Vegetarian" (Britain's wartime plan to poison German cattle with anthrax). Rosie even makes a few stops in America, where he tracks down John Ross, the Highland Scot and Cherokee who became "the Native American statesman of the early nineteenth century" and dealt with every president from James Madison in 1816 to Andrew Johnson half a century later. There is much that readers "never knew" about and will be glad to have been told. 11 b&w illus., map. (Aug.)