Customer Reviews

Castles: Their Construction and History (Dover Architecture)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As an Army Officer the study of military history is a professional necessity. The book: Castles their Construction and History has proven to be an incredible aid to this end. I am stationed in Europe and use the book as a guide when I travel and explore the castles in Germany, France and Italy. The book is very technical, it wastes some space giving detailed step by step descriptions of many castles but the casual reader of history will find the drawings, photos and overviews of history very interesting. The text of the book is rather dull to the non-history buff. It was very useful as a reference book while at the University of Florida.

I bought this book because, well to put it plainly, I have always wanted to design a castle of my own. Having no real talent for architecture, I thought I'd see how others had done it before, and why they made the decisions they did. This book does a lot for the novice who wants to learn these things, but does so with enough illustrations to keep the readers interest through the text. I can see why another reviewer said it would make a good textbook -- it reads like one, and provides quite the education!

Add it to a military history collection, a chivalric texts collection, or to your Lego room for the next time you want a more powerful castle than the kit suggests (but, putting little lego men heads on pikes at the gates may be going overboard).

There is no fluff and no romanticizing. This book is just plain hows and whys on castle construction and their evolution from wooden stockades to stone fortresses. It examines the changes in defenses as warfare evolved. It is dry reading, but this is bare bones information with no fantasizing....just what I wanted.

This book was written in the 1930's but it is indeed a timeless record of castles from BC to the age of fortifications. I first thought that this was too old of a book but after reading it, it is clearly a great castle book. The real treasure is that it was compiled before Hitler bombed the crap out of Europe. It is chronilogical. It is referenced perfectly. The illustrations include floor plans with scales and north arrows. Building sections keyed to the floor plans. Renderings and photographs keyed to the text. Sidney takes you thru all the different building types and features that make a castle. My favorite is the "Keep". The text is very easy to follow. I was amazed at Sidney's gift of describing without the aid of photographs and drawings castle configurations. I recommend this book to anyone who wants a book that gets to the core of the subject of castles.

Castles: Their Construction and History by Sidney Toy gives details and floor-plans of many castle. Well written, with many illustrations, very useful for student of castle details. Recommended.

I wanted to get a better handle on castle architecture and this is.... It reads like a doctoral thesis and includes material on ancient and midieval castles but nothing in depth. My bad... I forgot to read the blurb at the bottom of the page.

This is unfortunately another book on castles which spends more time describing details rather than explaining or synthesizing. I am looking for a book which shows how castle building evolved, and which makes use of illustrations - not prose - to describe the details. I would say the text in this book can be cut by 80% if well constructed diagrams replace the lengthy descriptions. The remaining 20% would constitute the interesting part of this book. Not that it would be sufficient to understand the history.

Can anyone write something like that? Although this one is better than others, none comes close to be an interesting study. Maybe a single author can't cut it, and both an architect and a historian need to be involved.