Customer Reviews

The Fall of Constantinople

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I love Nanami Shiono and I read this book in Japanese first. She is such a great writer. Any translation can't be exact, especially from Asian language to English is not easy and vice versa. We lose the atomosphere and nuances of each sentence or the image we share when we hear a certain vocabulary. It's not the translator's but us who don't know enough about each other's culture. Still the story line of book is great and very entertaining. If you're interested in history and want to know more about the war between muslim and christian, this book will definitely get you some good insights.

This book, and it's 2 companion volumes, are very simplistic accounts of pivotal moments in renaissance mediterrean history.

As history they are very limited. There are no notes, no bibliographies, no idexes and very limited maps.

Worse, for books purporting to be history, their writing style is juvenile and contrived, more suited to maybe a sixth grade class room than adult history. The books are marred by made up conversations and situations, to perhaps illustrate history, but certainly nothing that was found in whatever research the author might have done.

I can't really see how this writer is the most loved historian in Japan, based on these books. Perhaps the translator has simplified the language and ideas, who knows.

So, if you have a grade school or junior high child who wanted an introduction to these events, they might be useful, but for adult reading they should be bypassed.

All in all, very disappointing efforts for someone who claims to be a historian.