Robertson's Book of Firsts is social history disguised as a quirky encyclopedia. Many of Patrick Robertson's engaging essays on firsts deal with the mundane: the bra, the plastic garbage bag, margarine, paintballs. Others tell the story of debuts that truly changed the world, like the first electric power plant, or describe major achievements that foreshadow later social change, such as the first black head of state of a predominately white government (William Ferguson, governor of the British colony of Sierra Leone in 1845).
One of Robertson's criteria for establishing his firsts will give historians heartburn: his firsts refer, he says, "to the first in the modern world." That doesn't matter when he's talking about garbage bags or margarine, but it distorts history substantially when he names 19th-century London as the first city with more a million people, ignoring eighth-century Baghdad. (He also has a habit of amending headings like "The First Choral Society" with "in America" when it comes to the actual text.)
Such quibbles aside, Robertson's Book of Firsts is wide-ranging, engaging and as addictive as a bag of salted peanuts. You pick it up to look up the first use of fingerprinting. The next thing you know you've worked your way back to the first flush toilet (invented in 1589), the first nudist camp (a very serious-minded endeavor founded in Germany in 1903) or the first call girls, literally prostitutes whose services could be ordered by telephone. Who knew? --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins