h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I probably read "Little men" fifty years ago. I probably should have reread Louisa May Alcott's canon after I read "March," the reimagined adventures of the "Little women" father in the Civil War.

Truth? It's very uncomfortable, indeed! There's a scene in "March" where Northern soldiers are trying to cope with newly freed slaves who have no one to tell them what to do. So, March happens to visit a plantation where soldiers are trying to avoid chaos, but in the process being much harder on some of the slaves than the bad old southern owners had been. Who knew that the good guys could be worse than the bad ones?

Alcott was a nurse during the War, and she overdosed on Mercury, which weakened her health ever afterwards. That's another truth that might not be too popular. (One of my grandmothers had a doctor who prescribed Mercury medication for constipation. One day she incurred a strangulated hernia, and kept taking the medication for four days before someone intervened and rushed her to the hospital. She survived another ten years, but without several feet of intestine, which had had to be removed .) Her doctor might not have been a monster, but in those days it was probably well known that mercury wasn't a good thing to have in your system. He was probably very old-school, not to mention stubborn about giving in to those new ways of doing things.

Yes, I'm probably going off topic, so I'll close with the Shakespearean of great people who also had great faults, and those faults played out in worst-case directions . Might there have a point at which Macbeth's developing monstrousness might have been headed off? Might Hamlet have avoided the high body count that waited at the end of Act Five?