The most popular book ever published in America is now almost totally forgotten. General MacArthur was told the Japanese were going to invade the Philippines—and ignored it. And the Dutch actually made a bad investment buying Manhattan for $24. We tend to think of history as an inevitable chain of events, with outcomes set in stone, but Seymour Morris reveals a past filled with ironies, accidents, surprises, near misses, and total falsehoods. Under such headings as It Almost Never Happened, The Past Was Different Then, and Lightning Strikes Twice, Morris gives us history as an intriguing series of forks in the road, where the results were never a foregone conclusion.