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From Booklist

May 15, 2023
If you found yourself face-to-face with a T. rex, what would you do? Thankfully, Cassidy (And Then You're Dead, 2017) has the answer to this and many more of life's most burning and seemingly unanswerable questions. How to Survive History is a highly entertaining look at such questions as how to escape Pompeii the day Mt. Vesuvius erupts, how to hunt a mammoth and survive, and how to build the Great Pyramids and live to tell the tale, all with the framing of the reader being a curious time traveler checking out some of history's most well-known yet deadly moments. Each question posed by the author is answered with a combination of science, math, historical record, and ingenuity, along with a healthy dose of humor. Graphs, graphics, and other images make fun, invaluable additions to the text. Not only will this be perfect for those interested in history, humor, and popular science, its highly conversational tone and handy graphs and images will greatly appeal to teen readers.

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From Publisher's Weekly

April 10, 2023
Cassidy follows up Who Ate the First Oyster? with an insightful and entertaining look at 15 of the most catastrophic events in world history. From the struggle between predator and prey in the age of dinosaurs to the 1925 tristate tornado, which "cut a mile-wide gash through southern Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana, and killed at least 695 people," Cassidy provides detailed accounts of the events leading up to each catastrophe and sound advice on how best they could have survived them. Conscripted laborers who built the Great Pyramid of Giza suffered from extreme arthritis and died at an average age of 35, Cassidy reveals, but those who sought a doctor's care for anything but "traumatic bone injuries" often regretted it: treatments included "broths of dead flies and cooked mice." Sheltering in place during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius was a bad idea (better to have fled north on the road to Naples), but members of the Donner Party who stuck to their cabins and "did nothing at all" improved their odds of survival by lowering their metabolism (overcoming the "social taboo" of cannibalism also helped). A crisp blend of humor, history, and science, this is a crowd pleaser.