Title: Breathtaking
Product review: Norman Davies is clearly confident that his view of history in general and history of Europe in particular is more interesting and probably more valid than many others who have approached these topics. I surmise that his view of history is that it is an argument to be waged, about the larger patterns and the more subtle threads, rather than a simple telling of the episodes and icons which later political entities have enshrined into myths that serve the ends of governance. On this score, Davies would not be unique. But in telling the history of Europe with this approach, he has undertaken a topic of so enormous a scope such that the scholarship would have to be breathtakingly manifest and the arguement would have to be breathtakingly persistant and persuasive. And he pulls it off. What emerges is a wonderfully constructed version of European history that seems connected across time and space. I found myself both stimalated and inspired.
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