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20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Slapdash, January 16, 2007
This review is from: Confrontation at Lepanto: Christendom vs. Islam (Hardcover)
"Never judge a book by its cover", the old saying goes. I'm sorry to say that this is a trap I fell into with this account of the battle, for the cover for Confrontation at Lepanto is excellent. The content, sadly, is not. Confrontation offers a great deal of preamble regarding the politics of the day and the preparaions for battle that manages to be cursory and irritatingly long-winded at the same time before the reader is finally treated to a scanty eleven or so pages (small pages) on the battle (it seems like far less). The book then proceeds on its way with an "aftermath" stretching all the way to the death of Don John of Austria that succeeds in being uninformative and yet dragging in much the same way as the lead up to the battle did. The entire thing reads very much like a stretched out Wikipedia entry--and you would probably learn about as much from one but for a few very small stories of the individuals which took part in the battle (allow me to underscore that: very and dissapointingly few, and not very vivididly recounted where the fighting is concerned). The author also seems to be trying too hard to throw around "big words". It is as though the entire thing has been run through a thesaurus in an effort to dress up the language and you will notice that "rancour", "rancourous" etc. seems to crop up with annoying frequency. The "Christendom vs. Islam" subtitle also seems (at the risk of sounding like a bit of a pinko) calculated to suck in anyone with a casual distrust or dislike of Islam in these turbulent times and keen to read about it taking a drubbing, as there wasn't really any discussion about the clash of cultures between East and West at the time. The book also offers a schmaltzy and highly ludicrous little epitaph about how the battle could have helped towards reconciliation between the combatabts which seems totally out of place. Readers expecting something to the standard of Ernle Bradford's excellent The Great Siege, Malta 1565 will be sorely disappointed.
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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Amateur history, May 11, 2007
This review is from: Confrontation at Lepanto: Christendom vs. Islam (Hardcover)
T. C. F. Hopkins is a pen name of vampire fantasy writer Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. This book has an earnest quality that is touching and slightly pathetic by turns. The back dustjacket-flap states that the author is "a famous and beloved author" who has been nominated for prizes but has never won any. This book is unlikely to change that trend. The writing is convoluted and over-punctuated, with frequent overblown vocabulary ("carnassial hatred," "oppugnant" purposes, a "recreant" capture, "diplomatic abjuration"), fatuous phrasing ("Europe had other problems on its plate," "dragged their metaphorical heels"), and too much repetition of content and phrase for an edited book. It is enough to state once that Venetians called their city The Most Serene Republic of Venice. Repeating the phrase at intervals seems too cute. That's unfortunate, because as an introduction to European religious politics of the 16th century and the great naval battle of Lepanto in the Corinth Channel in 1571, the book presents good background and a reasonably interesting narrative. My own interest in the battle stems from the fact that Cervantes, author of "Don Quixote" (Part I, 1605), served on a Spanish ship and emerged from the battle with his left hand maimed. The book has an index but no bibliography or notes, so the reader can't know what sources the author relied on or where to read more about some aspect of the events leading up to this bloody battle or resulting from the hard-fought victory of the Holy League over the Ottoman fleet. (This is particularly odd because the author has a detailed bibilography of her own books on her official Web site.) This unwillingness to acknowledge her sources makes the book much less useful than it might otherwise have been. The description of the battle has good passages but tends to peter out where a more able writer (C. S. Forester, Patrick O'Brian) would have brought out the excitement of the battle for the reader. If the publishers issue this book in paperback, they would be well advised to acknowledge sources and to provide better maps and some illustrations of the different types of ship used in the battle.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A poorly researched mess, January 8, 2009
16th century Mediterranean naval warfare has always fascinated me, so when I saw "Confrontation at Lepanto" at my local Borders bookstore, I was initially quite excited. That excitement, however, morphed into considerable disappointment, as I noted that "T.F.C. Hopkins" (aka fantasy author Chelsea Quinn Yarbro) had done a rather poor job in researching her book. The thing I found most irritating was how she got so many basic facts wrong about the battle; for example, on pages 131-133, she described the battle as beginning with the center divisions of the two fleets, when in fact, it was the Christian Left Wing and Ottoman Right Wing, which first clashed (the Centers did not lock horns until about 30 minutes later). Yarbro also failed to point out the superb handling of the Christian Left Wing by the Venetian Second-in-Command, Agostino Barbarigo, who swung back his line of galleys "like a door" to avoid being outflanked by the Turks (see Guilmartin's "Gunpowder and Galleys", for more info). In addition, Yarbro claimed that the Venetian Captain-General, Sebastiano Venier, was with the Christian Left Wing, but actually his galley was in the Christian Center, supporting the flagship of Don John of Austria (and ironically enough, the cover art of "Confrontation at Lepanto" features the famous painting by Michieli Vicentino, which correctly shows Venier's blood-red war galley supporting that of Don John). Yarbro blundered yet again when she wrote that Alessandro Farnese (The Duke of Parma) took Uchiali's flagship (Farnese did indeed take an Ottoman galley--supposedly almost singlehandedly--but it was not Uchiali's ship). There were various interesting details earlier in the book, regarding the events that ultimately led to the Battle of Lepanto, but even this one positive feature of Yarbro's work is marred by the fact that there is no bibliography, and no footnotes or endnotes of any kind. In the final analysis, there are many far better books that cover Lepanto, including John F. Guilmartin's "Gunpowder and Galleys" & "Galleons and Galleys", W.L. Rodgers' "Naval Warfare Under Oars 4th to 16th Centuries", Time-Life's "The Venetians" (part of their old "Seafarers" series), and Jack Beeching's classic "The Galleys at Lepanto". Chelsea Quinn Yarbro should frankly stick to writing about vampires.
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