| ||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Spain: A History for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
Product Description
Review
"A wonderful overview of an oft-unexplored history."--Booklist (on the previous edition)
English Historical Review
RICHARD Ford's statement that Spain is not one country but several, while now almost a cliche, bears repeating. Read the first page
Concordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
In general, the book met this requirement. It's easy to ready and does cover the entire scope of Spanish history. I had a few problems with it, however.
Each time period is covered by a different author, which means the style from one chapter to the next is very different. Some chapters are written in a very staid academic manner, which makes them rather dull. They seem to be out to prove a point, rather than cover the history. These chapters are in a minority, luckily. Most are easy to read summaries of their period with a few juicy tales thrown in.
My only other cricitism is that the book assumes the reader has a working knowledge of modern Spanish history. The civil war is covered in a very guarded way as if the reader knows the horrors involved.
Overall, it's a good, brief introduction to the topic, aimed at a more academic reader, rather than a ripping tale of Spanish history.
Oxford University Press can usually be counted on to put out a good product and this book is no exception. It is a nice coverage of the very complex past of Spain from pre-history to the present. It is edited by Raymond Carr but the individual chapters were written by different authors. Carr himself covers only the period from 1833-1931.
Ironically, it is Carr's section that I find the weakest of the book. He wanders through so many different names and governments that I became a bit lost. This is one of the main dangers about writing of Spain's recent past, I guess, since it seems that the leadership often changed minute by minute. Still, the earlier sections of the book are much more engaging.
Overall, I found this book to be a good read. It is quite detailed but still rather brief. Sometimes these histories tend to get lost over a thousand pages or so. This book can be read in a reasonalbe amount of time. I was also pleased to see how the importance of regionalism in Spain is brought out. For anyone interested in getting the big picture of Spanish history, this is a book for you.
Also, there are several high-quality pictures included, a bonus for a short survey history book. The bibliography has helped me choose other books to read. It is organized by chapter, which is helpful although some referenced books ought to have been included under more than one chapter.
I do have one complaint: there is no chapter on Islamic Spain. This topic is not covered at all, except peripherally when the Moors directly impinge upon the medieval Christian kingdoms. The Moorish presence is probably the single factor that, more than any other, distinguishes Spanish history from that of other Western European countries. Islamic Spain also made a huge contribution to the development of Western civilization by serving as the avenue for the reintroduction of Aristotle's works to Western Europe in the Middle Ages. Also, most of Spain was under Islamic rule for about 500 years. These facts are all discussed from the outsider view point of the Christian kingdoms, but I feel a chapter highlighting the nature of Islamic civilization in Spain would have been a tremendous addition.
Overall, however, the book quickly familiarizes the reader with the broad panorama of Spanish history in a coherent and enjoyable way. If you need such an introduction, I recommend this book.
[Reviewer's background: I am a non-historian who mostly reads history in his spare time. After a fascinating trip to Spain, I decided to pick this book up as my first introduction to its history.]
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
