Badass: Ultimate Deathmatch: Skull-Crushing True Stories of the Most Hardcore Duels, Showdowns, Fistfights, Last Stands, Suicide Charges, and Military Engagements of All Time

by Ben Thompson

Overview

From the Ben Thompson, author of Badass: The Birth of a Legend, comes a collection of history’s most awe-inspiring duels and showdowns, brutal crusades and epic brawls, and profiles of the fascinating people who fought in them.

From Caliphs to Green Berets, some of civilization’s toughest warriors are profiled in Badass: Ultimate Deathmatch, including Cyrus the Great, St. Moses the Black, and The Rani of Jhansi, as well as in-depth analyses of how they battled their way to victory.

Featuring original artworks by top graphic artists and comic book illustrators, and Ben Thompson’s signature wry, side-splitting commentary, Badass: Ultimate Deathmatch is the history of badasses, the only way it should be written: covered in blood!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062112347
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	03/12/2013
Series:	Badass Series
Pages:	487
Sales rank:	807,473
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Ben Thompson has run the warhammer of a website badassoftheweek.com since 2004, and has written humorous history-related columns for outlets such as Cracked, Fangoria, Penthouse, and the American Mustache Institute. Even though he's never flown a jetpack over the Atlantic Ocean or punched someone so hard that his head exploded, he is considered by many to be the world's foremost expert on badassitude. He is the author of Badass and Badass: The Birth of a Legend.

Editorial Reviews

Continuing with his theme of profiling badasses in all their badassery (his stated aim here is to recount “forty of my all-time favorite beatdowns from history”), Thompson marches on, recounting epic battles, standoffs, and skirmishes from antiquity through modern times in this testosterone-fueled collection. Beginning with the tale of Cyrus the Great’s 6th century B.C.E. attack on Lydia, Thompson (Badass: Birth of a Legend) covers all manner of conflicts, ranging from large-scale battles (e.g., Operation Desert Storm) to one-man-standing gunfights (like 77-year-old Don Alejo Garza Tamez’s shootout with Mexican gangsters in 2010), peppering the bloody tales with plenty of pop culture references and liberal doses of sarcasm. This approach, coupled with the brief summations of the battles, makes for engaging though wearying reading, best consumed in small doses. But that’s not to say the book isn’t wildly entertaining or well written. Thompson’s unabashed enthusiasm for his material (“Scythed war chariots are probably some of the most badass and most underappreciated weapons in all of ancient warfare.”) is palpable and infectious, and his research is admirable. Fans of mayhem—mythical and real—as well as military strategists will find this to be a worthwhile investment. 40 b&w illus. Agents: Farley Chase, Chase Literary Agency; Sean Daily, Hotchkiss and Associates. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

History for the Ted Nugent set--a follow-up to Badass: A Relentless Onslaught of the Toughest Warlords, Vikings, Samurai, Pirates, Gunfighters, and Military Commanders to Ever Live (2009). In order for a historical moment--in amateur historian Thompson's hands, almost always a desperate battle--to be worthy of consideration in this catalog of mayhem, it has to involve high stakes, impossible odds and a blaze of glory. On the last point: "The difference between a heroic victory, a valiant last stand, and a crushing defeat is often measured by the badly outnumbered side's ability to launch a balls-out attack at exactly the right moment." That's probably not the way they'd phrase it at West Point, but Thompson's compendium includes some sterling examples of bravery under fire, some very little known. One, for instance, involved a Russian paratroop unit that fought nearly to the last man in Chechnya, taking out nearly 10 foes for every paratrooper lost. "The Chechens were so impressed by this bold act of bravery," writes Thompson, "that they named a street after the Russian unit in the Chechen capital of Grozny--no small gesture considering how much these two groups hate each other." True enough. Many of the author's other case studies leave their names emblazoned on streets and other places, from Alcibiades to Napoleon to Wyatt Earp, but others are nearly forgotten--e.g., the Nazi fighter ace who later became a consultant to the U.S. Air Force and the unfortunate participants in what Thompson judges to be "history's dumbest battle," evidence of which the grand vizier of the Ottoman Empire later discovered and was "left trying to piece together…like those dudes in The Hangover." The maundering rhetoric, all "dudes" and "balls-out" and "badass," gets old fast, but Thompson's grasp of history is solid. Think of it as Thucydides for video gamers.

Kirkus Reviews