Posts Tagged ‘very short introduction’

This book is rubbish.

I had the audiobook edition and it is narrated by Christine Williams. I did not get along with her voice. Its level, unemotional, snyhtetic none meant it took me quite a while to work out whether it was actually a human reading it or some kind of experiment to see whether a computer could voice an audiobook.

The content was no better. No real introduction was provided and nothing was ever put in context. There was a discussion of Nietzsche’s books, but with no provision for those who are not already familiar with the man or philosophy in general. I could not follow what was going on. Not what I was looking for in a book entitled introduction.

I was somewhat disappointed when I first began reading History: A Very Short Introduction.

I was originally coping for a compact and concise list of everything that has happened in the past few thousand years. You know, Depression, Hitler, World War 2, Invention of Supermarkets, etc. You know, a way to know everything that has ever happened, in around a hundred pages.

However, History: A Very Short Introduction follows a different narrative, one more in line with the other books in the series, and common sense. It talks about “Historiography”, the study of history and methodologies used in such study.

While I found it just about interesting enough to continue reading all the way through, I must say that I didn’t feel I learnt a great deal. Having studied history for the first three years of high school, I felt that alone had given me a grounding in history to a greater level. You could of course argue this is obvious (three years of school vs a book that took me two days to read), but I would have expected the book to be pitched at a level that assumes the reader had in fact attended school.

Still, it isn’t entirely about the learning, but also about proving it on paper – and now that I can add having read said book to my CV, as I explained to Hugh, I’m now more than happy to fill in for him at his history lectures at any point.