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agnewjacob120's review
dark
informative
reflective
slow-paced
3.75
Interesting and very detailed history of the Thirty Years War. However, as this is a very complex and deep subject, some of the information tends to blend together, particularly as the author is very dry. Also, there is no conclusion at the end which makes it end very abruptly and lacks any final analysis.
wandering_john's review
informative
slow-paced
4.5
In depth study of seminal events in European history. Really interesting on links with English and Scottish history.
mike_baker's review
4.0
By anyone's standards this is a long book, and it's taken me an appropriately long time to read it. To an extent that's all my fault. Since graduating I haven't maintained the business of poring through academic historical tomes, preferring instead to read the new-fangled books that aim to be accessible to all - the Beevers and Hollands of this world. As a consequence this has at times felt like a long haul, whilst still highly readable a detailed account of the Thirty Years War that makes no concessions to its readers. Where you might look for the human interest stories of, say, STALINGRAD, what you get is discussion and doubt over the claims made that the war claimed more German lives proportionately than more modern conflicts. It's fascinating, but you can see it sitting far more comfortably in University libraries than on the average bookshelf.
Where it perhaps fails is in the difference between what it contains and what is suggested by the title - EUROPE'S TRAGEDY intimates a strong human drama, a lament for the long and drawn out seventeenth century war that ebbed and flowed across central Europe, taking lives indiscriminately along the way. That isn't what the book turns out to be. Casualties are listed and then the prose moves on, thousands killed without looking into who was affected, just listing the reasons (it's easy to forget how dynamic a killer the Black Death was at the time, but it takes a major supporting role here). In a sense, Wilson's approach is even more devastating because blood is spilled so casually throughout the book. By the war's closing stages you get a very real sense of all participants, let alone Germany, being exhausted, struggling to recruit men and horses, scrabbling for sustenance, the conflict ending because there was a genuine effort to put a stop to what was, in effect, an unwinnable fight.
The unimpeachably high level of detail means that the story has no heroes and villains. Everyone involved has a motive, reasons for pursuing their courses of action. 'Great figures' of the war, like Gustavus Adolphus and Wallenstein, emerge as highly capable yet flawed human beings, able to do great things and equally prone to folly. The cast of characters is immense. It's easy to get lost in the mixture of names, the dizzying number of Ferdinands, Maximilians, Georgs, etc.
I think it's a long and detailed book because the period demands that level of interrogation. The Holy Roman Empire, its make-up as an evolving entity, the relationship betwixt Emperor and client states, how the rest of the continent seemed to revolve around it, etc, is difficult to grasp, highly complicated. Wilson has gone on to write another doorstep about the HRE, such a tangled subject that the only way to tackle it was to ignore chronology and explore it thematically. In that sense, writing a book about the Thirty Years War, with all its people, elements, themes and angles - telling it from a secular or religious perspective, for example - and doing so in the order of events is no mean feat. I'm glad I finished it.
Where it perhaps fails is in the difference between what it contains and what is suggested by the title - EUROPE'S TRAGEDY intimates a strong human drama, a lament for the long and drawn out seventeenth century war that ebbed and flowed across central Europe, taking lives indiscriminately along the way. That isn't what the book turns out to be. Casualties are listed and then the prose moves on, thousands killed without looking into who was affected, just listing the reasons (it's easy to forget how dynamic a killer the Black Death was at the time, but it takes a major supporting role here). In a sense, Wilson's approach is even more devastating because blood is spilled so casually throughout the book. By the war's closing stages you get a very real sense of all participants, let alone Germany, being exhausted, struggling to recruit men and horses, scrabbling for sustenance, the conflict ending because there was a genuine effort to put a stop to what was, in effect, an unwinnable fight.
The unimpeachably high level of detail means that the story has no heroes and villains. Everyone involved has a motive, reasons for pursuing their courses of action. 'Great figures' of the war, like Gustavus Adolphus and Wallenstein, emerge as highly capable yet flawed human beings, able to do great things and equally prone to folly. The cast of characters is immense. It's easy to get lost in the mixture of names, the dizzying number of Ferdinands, Maximilians, Georgs, etc.
I think it's a long and detailed book because the period demands that level of interrogation. The Holy Roman Empire, its make-up as an evolving entity, the relationship betwixt Emperor and client states, how the rest of the continent seemed to revolve around it, etc, is difficult to grasp, highly complicated. Wilson has gone on to write another doorstep about the HRE, such a tangled subject that the only way to tackle it was to ignore chronology and explore it thematically. In that sense, writing a book about the Thirty Years War, with all its people, elements, themes and angles - telling it from a secular or religious perspective, for example - and doing so in the order of events is no mean feat. I'm glad I finished it.
capellan's review
3.0
A dense and detailed account of the Thirty Years' War. Probably too dense and detailed actually, as the blizzard of place and person names becomes overwhelming at points. I think it would have been profitable to "lift up" the narrative to a more strategic level in many places. Certainly it would have been a good idea to include more strategic maps. Almost all of the maps in the book are of individual battles, and don't always do a very clear job at that. Having maps that put the battle sites in their wider context would have helped a lot.
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