Customer Reviews

The Rise and Fall of the Holy Roman Empire: From Charlemagne to Napoleon

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

First off, the reviewers who praise this must not be used to reading nonfiction. This book presents an incredibly biased interpretation of history, lacks footnotes, contains numerous factual errors, and, perhaps worst of all, has not been edited. The spelling and grammatical errors contained within are the type that would be shocking in even a rough draft, much less a polished finished product.

Do not buy this to learn anything about the Medieval or early Modern Empire. Although no one-volume work exists to cover the entire history of the Holy Roman Empire, vastly superior works on individual periods and emperors can be easily found. If the book's price weren't so low, I'd return it.

This is not a history book. It's just a prattling of facts, filled with historical errors (like calling the Magyars a Slavic people), hundreds of editing errors (notice how Charles the Bald dies in 881 to miraculoulsy reappear to die again in 888), biased information (like the laughable chapter on the Spanish conquest of the Americas), cheap Protestant propaganda and void pseudo-moral teachings.

Actually, it's my fault. I should've returned this book when I saw in the back cover that the author, David Criswell had a M.Div. from Criswell College . . . yes, Criswell; and that he had written books science, reliion, history, anthropology and medical ethics!

If you want facts and a couple of anecdotes or scandalous details, this is a book for you. For the rest of us, until a true historian writes a comprehensive book on this subject (probably a two- or three-volume book), I recommend the good books on specific subjects, such as Norwich's three-volume history of Byzantium, Wedgwood's Thirty Years War, Kann's excellent account of the Habsburg Empire or Riley-Smith's one-volume book on the Crusades, just a name a few.

I am a history fan, when I saw this book with the title of HOLY ROMAN EMPİRE I think that this book is gorgeous. But when I start to read this book I understand that the author is a fundamentalist. For history lovers and the ones who want to learn history with a right perspective DONT READ THİS BOOK.Even 1 Dolar is much for this

Like others, I was looking for a history of the Holy Roman Empire. Like others, I was fooled into thinking this was that history. Please do not be fooled. Please read the other one-star reviews. This is without doubt one of the worst books I have ever tried to read. Everything the other one-star reviews say is true, so I won't repeat them. Just don't buy this book.

What can I say that hasn't already been written by other reviewers. I will reiterate that under no circumstances would I recommend this to anyone. It is a poorly written history with absolutely no focus. My favorite typo was incorrectly naming Francis of Styria, Francis of Syria. As an Eastern European historian, I am always appalled at the use of the word Russian when naming the people of Kyiv Rus and it shows that his research was less than complete. The author does have a bias and it is made abundantly clear throughout the book. Regarding the Thirty Years' War, the author places sole blame on the destruction of Germany on the Papal armies, painting a convenient picture of Protestant armies who left the countryside untouched.

Personally, one of the most frustrating aspects was his decision to latinize every character's name in the book. Instead of using Heinrich, or Henri, he chose to say simply Henry. This becomes very confusing as the book progresses. Francis (Francois), Charles (Carlos), Louis (Ludwig) etc. It would be much easier to connect and remember the main players if they could be connected with their respective countries. I felt that this was an attempt to "dumb down" the content to make it more accessible to English readers but it had the opposite effect.

The lack of focus was either by choice or he misnamed the book. I thought the book should be renamed "A History of European Religious Conflict from Charlemagne to Napoleon". Again, my suggestion is that you stay clear of this book because if you are new to this history, it could leave you with a biased view and if you are familiar with it, you will have the urge to throw it out the window with each paragraph.

I am reading through this book for the second time and find I must write this review in haste so as to save others from using this work as a basis for future works on the Holy Roman Empire. This book lacks considerable focus, most likely due to the wide array of disparate degrees held by the author. The work is clearly biased towards favoring the history of the church and christianity, while amplifying and distorting the environment in which christianity spread. The lack of citations as well as detailed information concerning major points of history makes me wonder as to the work's authenticity and possible plagarism. Furthermore, the entire text is written at a sub-academic level; I know of no 8th grader who would pick up this book and read it. And finally, again, the most gross error in this book is its bias. History is not something theologians get to rewrite to make them feel better about their heritage. Rather History is the search for and publishing of the Truth, no matter how disgusting and no matter how disgraceful. If the author felt he needed to cover up or reinterprete the barbarian acts of the Church and the Holy Roman Empire's early leaders, then he should have wrote a novel... oh, wait! He did.

Awful book. It looks like a really bad draft of an expanded MA dissertation. Spelling mistakes that would make a 15 year old cringe page after page, a very narrow and skewed view of history. The author insisted that the book was fact-driven; rather, it was driven by skewed interpretations of selective facts. This book really gives proper academia a bad name. Awful.

There isn't much to praise about this book at all. Its presentation of history is so overtly agenda-driven one cannot take on faith (so to speak) a word it says. "Pagans bad, evil, nasty; Christians good, nice, happy"--this, over and over. It reads like something Ann Coulter might write, except that I think Coulter can at least hire a good enough editor to sound collegiate. This does not; its short, error-ridden sentences leave me with the impression it was written for ages 7-9.

Now, if you've always wanted a preachy interpretation of medieval Western history written in sentences that assume a sub-eighth grade education, and you consider numerous editing errors a comforting sign of strength rather than of ineptitude and sloppiness, your ship has come. Just don't go citing it in your collegiate history paper (unless you're at Bob Jones University), because they wouldn't accept this at Baylor. Or Notre Dame, or Gonzaga, or Wake Forest, or any of the many prestigious Christian-founded schools in the nation. This puerile sermon fails every essential test of respectable historical writing.

This is not an objective, scholarly history of the Holy Roman Empire. Rather, it is an attempt by a fundamentalist Christian to misrepresent history for the sake of furthering an agenda. This excerpt is typical: "While Charlemagne has been criticized for this it must be remembered that paganism and Christianity simply could not coexist together. History had proven this. The pagan gods were vengeful gods who could never accept the idea of monotheism."

I think it is pretty deceptive of the publisher not to indicate somewhere on the cover that this book was intended as a religious polemic rather than as serious history.

I purchased this volume back in 2006 with high hopes that, finally, someone had produced a thorough one volume history of the Empire to trump Friedrich Heer's effort. What I received totally dashed my expectations. It was merely a lumping together of short sections on different rulers and incidents, superficially researched--more like a collection of crudely written newspaper articles than a book. I was so disgusted, I returned the volume to Amazon for a full refund--the only time I have ever done this.