@skematica That must have been one sharp glucose meter.
@matigo Accidentally sliced my finger open last night with a lancet while I was preparing to do a blood glucose check. A nice deep slice, too.
@kdfrawg It even has its own Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ForWantofaNail_(novel)
@kdfrawg The other nice thing about the Sobel book is that he diverges from the actual timeline early enough to construct a very different history of North America and the world that is also fairly plausible. It isn't just alternate Civil War/World War II stuff with alternate Lincolns and Hitlers.
@kdfrawg The problem with alternate history is that so much of it is crap (see much of what Newt Gingrich has written). One of the best examples, on the other hand, was written by economic historian Robert Sobel: For Want of a Nail: If Burgoyne Had Won at Saratoga. It's written like an academic history book, complete with footnotes, endnotes, and references. Absolutely brilliant.
@kdfrawg Good alternate history (or counterfactual history as it's known in academic circles) is more difficult, I think, because you have to know the history of how things happened in real life in order to write it.
@kdfrawg Oh, and how could I forget: The Afrika Reich and The Madagaskar Plan (both by Guy Saville) were ripping good reads.