Customer Reviews

Transylvania: A Short History

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The other review was so negative that I bought the book. Yes, the prose is lousy. The logic jumps around so much that the problem must be with the author rather than the translator. This book has three merits. First, it is a useful source of random information (I had never heard of the Csangos before). Second, it is useful to be reminded to the historical attitudes that so often make central Europe ungovernable. Third, it makes us more conscious of similar biases in our own history. If this can get into English, one wonders what remains in the decent obscurity of a local language.

This book has the distinction of being the worst book I have ever read. It is poorly written and often completely incomprehensible. Making matters worse it was written in Hungarian and poorly translated to English. I would be able to overlook those obvious problems with the book if the content was valid, unfortunately the author wrote this book with an extreme bias towards the Hungarian version of Transylvanian history and the truth is often lost to myth. Further undermining the creditability of the author is his lack of citations. He uses several quotes without citing any sources and expects his readers to take his word on good faith. There is very little organization to the chapters and he jumps back and forth through various time periods with no notice. Transylvanian history is complex enough without having to deal with this authors poor organization. I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone and I question how it ever managed to get published in the first place!