We Were There
and over 900,000 other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Visit the Amazon.co.uk Trade-In Store for more details. |
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
Product Description
Review
'Robert Fox has a scholar's instinct and a journalist's eye ... this is superb, revealing and stimulating' --Peter Hennessy
'A magnificent collection' --Andrew Marr
'To have an anthology of first-rate eyewitness material of this kind is both a treat and an education.' --A. C. Grayling, Financial Times
`Addictive and easy to dip into, readers will feel like they are viewing the events featured first hand.' --Soldier Magazine
`Excellent... adds up to a vivid history of the human experience of the 20th century.' --Sue Wingrove, BBC History
'A magnificent collection' --Andrew Marr
'To have an anthology of first-rate eyewitness material of this kind is both a treat and an education.' --A. C. Grayling, Financial Times
`Addictive and easy to dip into, readers will feel like they are viewing the events featured first hand.' --Soldier Magazine
`Excellent... adds up to a vivid history of the human experience of the 20th century.' --Sue Wingrove, BBC History
Book Description
'A most wonderful collection...I will put it on my shelf and take it off over and over again' Simon Schama
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
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)
|
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars
Eye on history,
By
This review is from: We Were There: An Eyewitness History of the Twentieth Century (Paperback)
This is a massive collection of thoughts by people who lived through interesting times. Some of them were on the spot and written as a diarist would - such as the last pages of Scott's journals until his last when he and his team of Antarctic explorers perished. His entry concerning the last moments of his team-mate Titus Oates is worth pondering whether they let him leave the camp knowing he went out to kill himself. Some were semi-autobiographic in the sense that they were written as novels - such as hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms" and Azar Nafisi's "Reading Lolita in Tehran". Accounts of wars in Bosnia and Vietnam are thought-provoking, especially the account of the way soldiers killed Vietcongs as if their lives were no more consequential than that of ants. The reader may not help thinking that these reports written by people who were there were nontheless coloured by the writers' own subjective impressions. That makes us wonder how accurate history is when written years later by people who weren't there. History is only impressions.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent book, excellent delivery & packaging (as always),
By
This review is from: We Were There: An Eyewitness History of the Twentieth Century (Paperback)
As always, there is never a problem with Amazon - I can rely on them for great prices, great descriptions of goods and reliable transations. Thoroughly recommend them to all.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
4.0 out of 5 stars (4 customer reviews) 6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Eyewitness,
By wogan "the book reader" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: We Were There: An Eyewitness History of the Twentieth Century (Hardcover)
`We Were There' is a collection of essays. They are edited and abbreviated, but that allows a huge collection of historical eyewitness accounts from both well known and those who are not known to history. The essays begin with the discovery of radium and end with demonstrations in Tehran in 2009. In between are stories recounting the sinking of the Titanic, the assassinations at Sarajevo, the Great Depression, the Blitz, D-Day, Beatlemania, the Moon Landing, Vietnam, a meeting with Osama bin Laden, 9/11. The scope is amazing as are the collection of authors; Ernest Hemingway, Neil Armstrong, Hunter S. Thompson, John Updike's witness to the collapse of the World Trade Center.
The essays are divided into sections with several essays in each section. The stories are short, but so gripping that, that taste leaves you frustrated for more. Backgrounds of historical/social significance are given for each section and a bit to tell you who and what each author is writing about. There is a very small section of pictures and an index and a source guide. This is truly a fascinating account of the 20th century, told by those who were there. Not all are famous or are even reporters and writers, but that makes their accounts that much more fascinating for anyone wishing to learn what history is all about. 2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Heavy focus on wars, disasters and journalistic events from Western perspective,
By Marc Riese - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: We Were There: An Eyewitness History of the Twentieth Century (Hardcover)
This book is a chronologically ordered collection of first-person accounts of historic events over the 20th century. The editor, Robert Fox, introduces each account with an explanation of the context and of who the writer was. Two-thirds or more of the selections deal with war-related history, disasters or massacres. The rest is eclectic but journalistic in nature and of course event-oriented. Robert Fox, explains: "Much of the choice is coloured by my life over the past 43 years or so as a journalist, traveller, and amateur historian." The book is a revised version of the original "Eyewitness to history" (Folio, 2008).
The book has 351 pages of numerous personal accounts. They are entertaining and would be informative mostly for those unfamiliar with 20th century wars. It also includes details that do not show in conventional histories. (For example, that people running from Vesuvius could not even be saved if they made it to the coast, because the water near the shore was so contaminated and deep.) It is strange to read snippet after snippet from different people writing in different ways about different things. It is history conveyed through anecdotes about individual experiences. For me the most remarkable and touching story was from an Englishman, Eric Newby, who had escaped German imprisonment in Italy in 1943, and was on the run. Newby hat taken off his boots and was sleeping in an idyllic Italian field in the sun, to be woken by a tall, armed German officer simply looking down at him and greeting him in Italian and English. Newby's immediate terror dissipated slowly as he realised that the fellow was a gentle, cultivated person. He was an educated German who hated the war, was ashamed of being associated with the Nazis, and was forced into teaching Renaissance history to his brutal and uninterested fellow officers during their occupation of Italy. The German shared his two beers with the Englishman and spoke of the inevitable defeat of the Germans. He then excused himself and went on his way to catch butterflies in the field. Newby concludes, "I was sorry to see him go." One imagines that the good German had a butterfly's chance in hell of surviving. The book does not attempt to reproduce the sources exactly. The editor warns from the start that the texts are not fully authentic. Selections have been "silently" cut, i.e., without ellipses. The styles have been "harmonised" to avoid undue "distraction". This is a matter of taste, but the book would have been better for me if it had been faithful and accurate . It was annoying to read in the introduction to Hemmingway's "first-person account" of the defeat at Caporetto that Hemmingway was not even present at the event! The selections are all interesting, but they say little of trends, nor of the development of ideas, nor of how individuals experienced normal life in the 20th century. The accounts are mainly about Western events and almost exclusively from the Western perspective. For a somewhat wider horizon of eye-witness accounts spanning various events over recorded history and with less focus on wars, I recommend "The Mammoth Book of How it Happened" (editor Jon E. Lewis). 1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
No Korean War?,
By Chuck - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: We Were There: An Eyewitness History of the Twentieth Century (Hardcover)
I was disappointed and surprised to find no mention of the Korean War. It lasted more than three years and killed tens, if not hundreds,of thousands. It was also a major armed conflict between the United States and its allies and the Communist Chinese.
|
|
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.
|
