Dead for Nothing is a guided tour through history’s most embarrassing bloodstains.

This is not a book about grand strategy, noble causes, or heroic last stands. This is a book about pigs, pastries, buckets, chairs, cows, mustaches, maps, dogs, dances, and other profoundly stupid reasons human beings have decided to kill each other. It’s about wars that began with tantrums, escalated through ego, and ended with bodies in the dirt and absolutely nothing to show for it.

Inside, you’ll find short, brutal chapters on conflicts that should never have happened but absolutely did. Armies mobilized over livestock disputes. Empires blockaded nations because a baker complained. Soldiers died so politicians wouldn’t lose face over furniture, salt, or a line scribbled on a map by someone who’d never set foot on the land. These wars weren’t accidents. They were honesty. Pride stripped bare, stupidity given bayonets.

Along the way, Dead for Nothing also catalogs history’s greatest “Leroy Jenkins” moments, those catastrophic flashes when one dumbass charge, one drunken guard, or one half-cocked decision turned a bad situation into a massacre. And it pauses at the battlefield’s worst “oh shit” moments, the instant when confidence curdled into panic and victory collapsed into slaughter.

The tone is dark, sharp, and unsentimental. The humor is earned, because the deaths were real. Farmers, conscripts, civilians, and bystanders paid the price while leaders congratulated themselves for defending “honor.”

If you’re looking for inspiration, this isn’t it. If you’re looking for patriotism, you’re in the wrong place. But if you want to understand humanity as it actually is—petty, violent, absurd, and frighteningly consistent—this book has receipts.

History didn’t have to be this stupid.
But it almost always was.