I’m rather upset that I had to interrupt my doomshopping and doomscrolling to read The World According to Cunk. It totally got me out of my post election funk because it’s hilarious! Truly laugh-out-loud funny.
While based on the real world, and history, and stuff like that, Cunk has an unusual viewpoint that she is quite willing to share.
“Cavemen were just posh bears.”
“A fence is a state-of-the-art wooden forcefield.”
Writing “was an early version of data harvesting, about actual harvesting.”
The Crusades were when “Christian Europe decided that the Muslims needed help; specifically, they needed Jesus‘s love stabbed into them.”
Cunk also frequently confuses common terms to humorous effect. For example, she states Europe and Asia is the landmass collectively known as Erasure and that the corpulent ruler and initiator of the Church of England is named Henry the Ate.
The book is also very British. Despite frequent viewing of British mystery series, I still had to rely on my Kindle to define a word or two per chapter. So keep your phone handy if you are reading the hardcover version.
Overall, The World According to Cunk is a book to either love (if you have a sense of humor and love puns), or be frustrated by (especially common with stuffy non-British historians, I suppose). I fall strongly in the first group. Netflix has a Cunk series that is also a world history with less detail but more pictures. The jokes are mostly new in this book so fans of the series will most likely love the book too. 5 stars!
Thanks to NetGalley and Grand Central Publishing for providing me with an advanced review copy.