Charlemagne: The Legend and the Man (Hardcover)

by Harold Lamb (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Doubleday (June 1954)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385040660
• ISBN-13: 978-0385040662
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,035,313 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Charles the Great, January 22, 2003

By	Patricia R. Andersen "redheaded booklover" (Baltimore, MD USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

Harold Lamb is an amazing writer and really brings Charlemagne to life. At an age when most boys (of this era) are trying to figure out what video game to play next, Charlemagne was leading his first military expedition. The book starts off with Charles, son of Pepin the Short, being all of 11 years old and starting off with Charles being named the "noble son" of the king.

You learn of his background - he was the son of a favored mistress who married the king - a few years after Charles was born. His younger brother, born after the wedding, was the favorite of his father and Charles was somewhat jealous of that situation.

The book takes you through all the times of Charles the Great, the one they called Charlemagne - he conquered _all_ of Europe, from the Pyrenees to Constantinople,He established schools and laws that persist to this day. He was considered the absolute monarch of the Christian world. This book takes you every step of the way with him, through his military campaigns as well as his life with his family.

This book is a wonderful read and I recommend it highly for those of you who are interested in history.

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Karl Grosse, February 4, 2003

By	Matherson (New York) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

There are very few published biographies of Charlemagne, King of the Franks, patron of the arts and the first Holy Roman Emperor. Part of the reason is that the sources for the early medieval era are often unreliable. And academic medievalists, particularly in covering the Carolingan period, tend to be extremely dry.

The last thing one can say about Harold Lamb is that his prose is dry. Sadly, however, he veers too far towards the opposite end of the spectrum: his prose is fruity to the point of being just plain overripe; he frequently interposes invented dialogue, and he can never avoid making pat judgments on the protagonists' foibles. This is less a history than an historical novel, and a pretty dated one at that.

If you are after a readable, reliable narrative history of Charlemagne, I would suggest either Chamberlin's book, or alternatively the entry on "Charlemagne" in Dahmus' "Seven Medieval Kings."