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A review by randomprogrammer
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara W. Tuchman
Did not finish book.
I slogged 300 pages into this miserable mishmash of facts and dates before jumping ship. With every new page, I cradled the dying flame of my hope that this might somehow make for an interesting rendition of the middle ages. It did not.
Tuchman somehow manages to overwhelm the reader with information while simultaneously telling you nothing at all. She does this by endlessly shifting context and persistently lacking depth.
For example, she gives overviews of economic, clerical, and societal changes, but she'll constantly jump backwards and forwards in time, making it impossible to keep track of which economic events coincided with which clerical habits, and preventing the easy formation of broad understanding.
She'll gleefully inform the reader of the well-known predominance of the English longbow, but will rob you of any deeper understanding by neglecting to speak on why the French couldn't just use longbows themselves.
When speaking of a continent composed of a dozen varied countries, she will make gross generalizations on behavior or culture, without ever bothering to distinguish between region or social class.
I think this is a work that tries to tackle too much, and does so at the expense of the reader's understanding. Perhaps I will look for another, more focused book.
Tuchman somehow manages to overwhelm the reader with information while simultaneously telling you nothing at all. She does this by endlessly shifting context and persistently lacking depth.
For example, she gives overviews of economic, clerical, and societal changes, but she'll constantly jump backwards and forwards in time, making it impossible to keep track of which economic events coincided with which clerical habits, and preventing the easy formation of broad understanding.
She'll gleefully inform the reader of the well-known predominance of the English longbow, but will rob you of any deeper understanding by neglecting to speak on why the French couldn't just use longbows themselves.
When speaking of a continent composed of a dozen varied countries, she will make gross generalizations on behavior or culture, without ever bothering to distinguish between region or social class.
I think this is a work that tries to tackle too much, and does so at the expense of the reader's understanding. Perhaps I will look for another, more focused book.