Europe Books - Page 2

I Never Knew that About Ireland

Christopher Winn

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Subjects -> History -> Europe -> Ireland -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

For real travelers or dreamers 4 out of 5 stars.
13 of 13 people found this review helpful.

This is a different kind of travel book. Not a guidebook in the Frommer's or Lonely Planet tradition, but just as valuable for learning more about the country of Ireland. This book covers the four province of Ireland: Connacht, Leinster, Munster and Ulster. Each county within the four provinces are featured. At the end of each section there is an "I Never Knew That..." section. Some things that I bet you never knew about Ireland:

-- In 1822, Richard Martin put through Parliament the first Animal Rights Bill and two years later founded the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

-- Rosslare has an average of 4 hours and 20 minutes of sunshine every day. (Living in Washington State, that sounds like paradise!)

-- You have heard of Stonehenge but did you know that the Grange Stone Circle is made up of 113 stones and is the largest prehistoric stone circle in Ireland (it dates from around 2000 BC).

-- The DeLorean (the famous car from Back to the Future) was built in Ireland and caught the eye of Hollywood producers.

--Sophie Pierce was the first woman to make a parachute jump, the first person in the world to fly solo from Cape Town to London and the first woman in Ireland and Britain to gain a commercial pilot's license. Unfortunately she fell out of a tram and was killed.

Winn has written a book with a warm personable tone. I felt as if I were listening to a fun friend who loved Ireland and knew neat trivia about each region. There is something for everyone as there are facts and stories about famous people, true crime, myths and inventions. Although color photos would have been nice, the numerous black and white sketches add charm to this book.

Winn is a writer, quiz master and producer for theater and television. He has also written I Never Knew That books about England, Scotland, Wales and London.

Armchair Interviews says: A wonderful book for trivia buffs and armchair travelers!

Editorial Review:

In this wonderful compendium, Christopher Winn gives a tour of the four provinces of Ireland---Connacht, Leinster, Munster, and Ulster. Find out where dreams were inspired, ideas were born, and where the unforgettable heroes of Ireland’s past now slumber. A treasure trove of fascinating stories, I Never Knew That About Ireland is packed full of information on the colorful history of the Emerald Isle.
This irresistible book gives a captivating insight into the heritage, memories, and monuments that have shaped each county in Ireland, searching out their secrets and unearthing their hidden gems.

Thames: The Biography

Peter Ackroyd

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In this perfect companion to London: The Biography, Peter Ackroyd once again delves into the hidden byways of history, describing the river’s endless allure in a journey overflowing with characters, incidents, and wry observations.

Thames: The Biography meanders gloriously, rather like the river itself. In short, lively chapters Ackroyd writes about connections between the Thames and such historical figures as Julius Caesar and Henry the VIII, and offers memorable portraits of the ordinary men and women who depend upon the river for their livelihoods. He visits all the towns and villages along the river from Oxfordshire to London and describes the magnificent royal residences, as well as the bridges and docks, locks and weirs, found along its 215-mile run. The Thames as a source of artistic inspiration comes brilliantly to life as Ackroyd invokes Chaucer, Shakespeare, Turner, Shelley, and other writers, poets, and painters who have been enchanted by its many moods and colors.

In his signature entertaining and informative manner, Ackroyd allows the reader to dip into chapters in his own spirit, or to follow the Thames from source to sea.
Illustrated with maps and photographs, THAMES is a vivid, highly original mosaic of life by and on the water.

The Duchess

Amanda Foreman

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Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Specific Groups -> Women

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Dutchess - History Book in Disguise 3 out of 5 stars.
4 of 6 people found this review helpful.

I love period pieces and readiing historical bios but this book's format is not initially what you may think. Be sure to browse through it before you buy because its more in a "history book format" rather than an entertaining read about a woman's life.

It does have much, much more detail than the movie, which only skimmed over what made the Dutchess a memorable woman in her day.

Its an okay book, but best to read before you go to bed to relax you as its slow and choppy pace the way its written.

Editorial Review:

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

Now a major motion picture starring Keira Knightley and Ralph Fiennes

Lady Georgiana Spencer was the great-great-great-great-aunt of Diana, Princess of Wales, and was nearly as famous in her day. In 1774 Georgiana achieved immediate celebrity by marrying William Cavendish, fifth duke of Devonshire, one of England’s richest and most influential aristocrats. She became the queen of fashionable society and founder of the most important political salon of her time. But Georgiana’s public success concealed an unhappy marriage, a gambling addiction, drinking, drug-taking, and rampant love affairs with the leading politicians of the day. With penetrating insight, Amanda Foreman reveals a fascinating woman whose struggle against her own weaknesses, whose great beauty and flamboyance, and whose determination to play a part in the affairs of the world make her a vibrant, astonishingly contemporary figure.

Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire (Modern Library Paperbacks)

Amanda Foreman

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Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Leaders & Notable People -> Political

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 67 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Georgiana Spencer was, in a sense, an 18th-century It Girl. She came from one of England's richest and most landed families (the late Princess Diana was a Spencer too) and married into another. She was beautiful, sensitive, and extravagant--drugs, drink, high-profile love affairs, and even gambling counted among her favorite leisure-time activities. Nonetheless, she quickly moved from a world dominated by social parties to one focused on political parties. The duchess was an intimate of ministers and princes, and she canvassed assiduously for the Whig cause, most famously in the Westminster election of 1784. By turns she was caricatured and fawned on by the press, and she provided the inspiration for the character of Lady Teazle in Richard Sheridan's famous play The School for Scandal. But her weaknesses marked the last part of her life. By 1784, for one, Georgiana owed "many, many, many thousands," and her creditors dogged her until her death.

Biographer Amanda Foreman describes astutely the mess that surrounded the personal relationships of the aristocratic subculture (Georgiana and the duke engaged for many years in a ménage à trois with Lady Elizabeth Fraser, who inveigled her way into the duke's bed and the duchess's heart). Foreman is, by her own admission, a little in love with her subject, which can lead to occasional lapses of perspective, but generally it adds zest to a narrative built on, rather than burdened by, scholarship, that is at once accessible and learned. An impressive debut, in every sense. --David Vincent, Amazon.co.uk

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl

Anne Frank

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 633 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A beloved classic since its initial publication in 1947, this vivid, insightful journal is a fitting memorial to the gifted Jewish teenager who died at Bergen-Belsen, Germany, in 1945. Born in 1929, Anne Frank received a blank diary on her 13th birthday, just weeks before she and her family went into hiding in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. Her marvelously detailed, engagingly personal entries chronicle 25 trying months of claustrophobic, quarrelsome intimacy with her parents, sister, a second family, and a middle-aged dentist who has little tolerance for Anne's vivacity. The diary's universal appeal stems from its riveting blend of the grubby particulars of life during wartime (scant, bad food; shabby, outgrown clothes that can't be replaced; constant fear of discovery) and candid discussion of emotions familiar to every adolescent (everyone criticizes me, no one sees my real nature, when will I be loved?). Yet Frank was no ordinary teen: the later entries reveal a sense of compassion and a spiritual depth remarkable in a girl barely 15. Her death epitomizes the madness of the Holocaust, but for the millions who meet Anne through her diary, it is also a very individual loss. --Wendy Smith

Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World

Patrick J. Buchanan

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 114 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Were World Wars I and II—which can now be seen as a thirty-year paroxysm of slaughter and destruction—inevitable? Were they necessary wars? Were the bloodiest and most devastating conflicts ever suffered by mankind fated by forces beyond men’s control? Or were they products of calamitous failures of judgment? In this monumental and provocative history, Patrick Buchanan makes the case that, if not for the blunders of British statesmen—Winston Churchill first among them—the horrors of two world wars and the Holocaust might have been avoided and the British Empire might never have collapsed into ruins. Half a century of murderous oppression of scores of millions under the iron boot of Communist tyranny might never have happened, and Europe’s central role in world affairs might have been sustained for many generations.

Among the British and Churchillian blunders were:

• The secret decision of a tiny cabal in the inner Cabinet in 1906 to take Britain straight to war against Germany, should she invade France
• The vengeful Treaty of Versailles that muti- lated Germany, leaving her bitter, betrayed, and receptive to the appeal of Adolf Hitler
• Britain’s capitulation, at Churchill’s urging, to American pressure to sever the Anglo- Japanese alliance, insulting and isolating Japan, pushing her onto the path of militarism and conquest
• The 1935 sanctions that drove Italy straight into the Axis with Hitler
• The greatest blunder in British history: the unsolicited war guarantee to Poland of March 1939—that guaranteed the Second World War
• Churchill’s astonishing blindness to Stalin’s true ambitions.

Certain to create controversy and spirited argument, Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War” is a grand and bold insight into the historic failures of judgment that ended centuries of European rule and guaranteed a future no one who lived in that vanished world could ever have envisioned.

The Man Who Made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren

Jonathan Lopez

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

It's a story that made Dutch painter Han van Meegeren famous worldwide when it broke at the end of World War II: A lifetime of disappointment drove him to forge Vermeers, one of which he sold to Hermann Goering, making a mockery of the Nazis. And it's a story that's been believed ever since. Too bad it isn't true.

Jonathan Lopez has drawn on never-before-seen documents from dozens of archives to write a revelatory new biography of the world’s most famous forger. Neither unappreciated artist nor antifascist hero, Van Meegeren emerges as an ingenious, dyed-in-the-wool crook who plied the forger's trade far longer than he ever admitted—a talented Mr. Ripley armed with a paintbrush. Lopez also explores a network of illicit commerce that operated across Europe: Not only was Van Meegeren a key player in that high-stakes game in the 1920s and '30s, landing fakes with powerful dealers and famous collectors such as Andrew Mellon, but he and his associates later offered a case study in wartime opportunism as they cashed in on the Nazi occupation.

The Man Who Made Vermeers is a long-overdue unvarnishing of Van Meegeren’s legend and a deliciously detailed story of deceit in the art world.

The Vertigo Years: Europe 1900-1914

Philipp Blom

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Subjects -> History -> World -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Europe, 1900–1914: a world adrift, a pulsating era of creativity and contradictions. The major topics of the day: terrorism, globalization, immigration, consumerism, the collapse of moral values, and the rivalry of superpowers. The twentieth century was not born in the trenches of the Somme or Passchendaele—but rather in the fifteen vertiginous years preceding World War I.

In this short span of time, a new world order was emerging in ultimately tragic contradiction to the old. These were the years in which the political and personal repercussions of the Industrial Revolution were felt worldwide: Cities grew like never before as people fled the countryside and their traditional identities; science created new possibilities as well as nightmares; education changed the outlook of millions of people; mass-produced items transformed daily life; industrial laborers demanded a share of political power; and women sought to change their place in society—as well as the very fabric of sexual relations.

From the tremendous hope for a new century embodied in the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris to the shattering assassination of a Habsburg archduke in Sarajevo in 1914, historian Philipp Blom chronicles this extraordinary epoch year by year. Prime Ministers and peasants, anarchists and actresses, scientists and psychopaths intermingle on the stage of a new century in this portrait of an opulent, unstable age on the brink of disaster.

Beautifully written and replete with deftly told anecdotes, The Vertigo Years brings the wonders, horrors, and fears of the early twentieth century vividly to life.

The Six Wives of Henry VIII

Alison Weir

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 141 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Fill in the holes, if you have read other books about this period. 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

A must read if you have been enticed by the interesting tale of the period... Perhaps you have read some of the fluffier books with more romance and fictional license. This is book fills in many of the holes. This book is a nice enjoyable read with great details that touch on the people in a Titan's wake.

The women come to life.
The politics and decisions that baffle us, centuries later, come into focus as you understand the rival nations and religious reform of the era. GREAT NOVEL.

This author did research and portrayed the characters factually and clearly.

Her Eleanor of Aquitaine novel is excellent as well.

Editorial Review:

The tempestuous, bloody, and splendid reign of Henry VIII of England (1509-1547) is one of the most fascinating in all history, not least for his marriage to six extraordinary women. In this accessible work of brilliant scholarship, Alison Weir draws on early biographies, letters, memoirs, account books, and diplomatic reports to bring these women to life. Catherine of Aragon emerges as a staunch though misguided woman of principle; Anne Boleyn, an ambitious adventuress with a penchant for vengeance; Jane Seymour, a strong-minded matriarch in the making; Anne of Cleves, a good-natured and innocent woman naively unaware of the court intrigues that determined her fate; Catherine Howard, an empty-headed wanton; and Catherine Parr, a warm-blooded bluestocking who survived King Henry to marry a fourth time.

The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale

Art Spiegelman

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 192 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

At last! Here is the definitive edition of the book acclaimed as “the most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust” (Wall Street Journal) and “the first masterpiece in comic book history” (The New Yorker). It now appears as it was originally envisioned by the author: The Complete Maus.

It is the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler’s Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father’s story. Maus approaches the unspeakable through the diminutive. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), shocks us out of any lingering sense of familiarity and succeeds in “drawing us closer to the bleak heart of the Holocaust” (The New York Times).

Maus is a haunting tale within a tale. Vladek’s harrowing story of survival is woven into the author’s account of his tortured relationship with his aging father. Against the backdrop of guilt brought by survival, they stage a normal life of small arguments and unhappy visits. This astonishing retelling of our century’s grisliest news is a story of survival, not only of Vladek but of the children who survive even the survivors. Maus studies the bloody pawprints of history and tracks its meaning for all of us.