Title: A much-hyped work suffering from innumerable errors of fact.
Product review: This is a most perplexing work. It has received extensive and highly favourable reviews, but its reliability as a general work of history is slim. The straightforward and quite extreme errors of fact are almost as numerous as the page numbers - for example, Davies gets the dates of all but one of the British Tudor monarchs wrong. What I find especially misleading, though, is its relentless stress on the centrality of Polish history to Europe; this reflects the author's specialism, not a disinterested judgement. Finally, his treatment of the term "genocide", with its bizarre attempt to identify analogous experiences with the Holocaust, runs perilously close to frivolity. All in all, this book will probably be forgotten in a few years' time; at least, I hope so.
Would you say this review depicts the product in a flattering or unflattering light?
