Customer Reviews

This Realm of England, 1399 to 1688 (A History of England)

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The second in an informative and entertaining series on English history, this book is not a difficult read, even if it's required for class. An excellent overview of this time period for any student of English history- or the average reader. One of the few disappointments was the section in which Oliver Cromwell appeared. Absent was any mention of reasons why historians such as Maurice Ashley have labelled Cromwell as a "brave, bad man", or of the atrocities he instigated in Ireland. If your interest does not include the information on Cromwell, this is an excellent book, one I did not sell back after the semester was over!

This is one of the more enjoyable college texts I have yet been required to read. It is a nice size, not at all unweildly, the pages are smooth and the language flows nicely. I like the inclusion of some portraits and the back of the book has the material broken up into centuries.

Bad sentence structure. Seems like written by a person who has no grammatical knowledge.
Hard to interpret what author is trying to say.
General editor(Big Shot)did a horrible job editing it.

Overall bad book for a notable historian to write.

What can I say? I wasn't impressed by this so-called "textbook." It doesn't seem matter-of-fact enough to be an actual textbook, yet isn't interesting enough to be considered a decent historical work. There is surprisingly little detail about the events here depicted.

I had to use this book for a class, but I found that I got about ten times more out of my instructor's lectures than this text. There really is very little to boast about here--it's basically just a mundane, watered-down history of England.

I hate to say it, but I was disappointed. I haven't studied much of English history, but even my limited knowledge was enough to know that this book is but a scratch on the surface. If you have to have this for a class, there's not much you can do, but if you're looking for a good history of England, keep looking.