Norman Davies: Europe: A History

We were heading off to France for a few weeks of touring and I realised I knew very little about European history. In fact, various sojourns through Ireland had demonstrated the huge gaps either in my education or my memory though probably both. Anyway I decided to remedy this by grabbing a few books from the library and other sources to read as we travelled. Most of them failed to survive past the first page; this one didn't. It was brilliant!

As I am writing this, I have not finished the book - it is quite long at almost 1400 regular pages - only up to chapter 4. Apart from the subject matter, which is all very interesting, there are quite a few features make this book stand out

• First off, the author's wonderful style. He writes as if telling you a favourite story with all the idiosyncracies that make a story personal to you and the teller - little tidbits of background details and colour 
• The book is written almost like a simple narrative. An ambitious task for a subject so broad, complex and interwoven with itself. It is very easy to read and for the parts I have read, the continuity from one protagonist to another makes the whole feel like a narrative
• There are quite a few out-takes. The subject is really complex and it must be impossible to deal with this complexity in a single book; easily solved, just create a brief (can be several pages long) out-take as an aside which you can choose to follow as the mood takes you.
• The book is structured in chapters which attempt to be self-contained usually covering a period dominated by a particular theme such as "The Romans" or "Greek culture"

With all these devices, the book is a pleasure to read. My copy was on a Kobo/Kindle which worked great for the text parts but the graphics and tables were dreadful, worse than useless on the Kobo. And it was very easy to lose context when reading through the lengthy. A hard-copy would be probably be a much better experience, but then it must be a weighty tome. Tough call - get both.

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