Europe : a history

by Norman Davies

Paper Book, 1996

Status

Available

Genres

Publication

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 1996.

Description

From the ice age to the Cold War, from Reykjavik to the Volga, from Minos to Margaret Thatcher, Norman Davies here tells the entire history of Europe in one single volume. The narrative zooms in from the distant focus of Chapter One, which explores the first five million years of the continent's development, to the close focus of the last two chapters, which cover the twentieth century at roughly one page per year. In between, Norman Davies presents a vast canvas packed with startling detail and thoughtful analysis. Alongside Europe's better-known stories - human, national and international - he examines subjects often spurned or neglected - Europe's stateless nations, for example, as well as the nation-states and great powers, and the minority groups from heretics and lepers to Romanies, Jews, and Muslims. He reveals not only the rich diversity of Europe's past but also the numerous prisms through which it can be viewed.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member bookomaniac

Extraordinary history of Europe. Brilliant, especially for its attention to eastern Europe, although written just after the opening of the Iron Curtain. The "lemma's" that accompany the chronological story are perfect complementaries, that give depth to the narrative.

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LibraryThing member libraryhermit

The theme that I found the most intriguing is that Europe, being a terminal peninsula at the edge of the massively bulky land-mass that is Eurasia, had hordes of raiders constantly spilling out from the core towards the edge over the centuries. Of course knowledge of Genghis Khan and others like

him is not new to the fraternity of readers of history, but to me, this amount of detail was new.
It is amazing how rotating a map of Europe 90 degrees clockwise, so that Europe is on the top and Russia and the rest of Asia on the bottom, completely changes one's perspective. How I used to think of the Scandanavian countries to be the outlying nether regions from the perspective of the central and southern European nations, is the same as how all of Europe is an outlying nether region to all of the people to the east.

(I originally posted this in Group: History Fans
Topic: What are your favorite history books? Hope this is alright.)

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LibraryThing member ElTomaso

Can you really put all of European history under one cover? Well, read this book and then decide! The author did a splendid job, whether this is just a primer or all you will ever want to know.

LibraryThing member RobertDay

This magisterial work takes a completely continental view of European history. It sets the story of migrations and the rise and fall of empires in a geographical context, starting with the premise that Europe is distinguished by the movement of populations in prehistoric times from East to West. It

therefore gives proper space to accounts of peoples., empires and movements beyond what we used to call 'the Iron Curtain'. To emphasise this point, many of the maps are drawn with North at the right-hand side, not the top. Davies constantly reminds us that he is trying very hard to avoid "Western-centricism".

The book has many 'capsules', self-contained essays on topics not central to the main thrust of the historical narrative but illuminating nonetheless. These can be accessed throughout the book by a sort of typographical hyperlink and they do not necessarily correspond to the chronological sequence of the text where they first appear.

The overall effect is one of comprehensiveness. This book is essential reading for anyone who thinks that there is something special about 'Britishness' (or any other sort of '-ness', for that matter). It shows that one way or another, we in the UK are all European, no matter what our origin.

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LibraryThing member andreg

An informative overview of the history of Europe as a whole. I really enojoyed the little boxes throughout the book highlighting little-known facts or anecdotes about the history of Europe. My favourite part was the essay at the start of the book, in which Davies presents his definition of European

history. I didn't find this book to be a great sholarly work, yet I found it entertaining, informative and thought-provoking.

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LibraryThing member johnnyryan

Excellent, beautifully written overview. Davies delivers a broad, sweeping history. One caveat: it passes quickly over detail, occasionally vaguely. Overall this is a masterpiece.

LibraryThing member gmicksmith

This is a voluminous but interesting survey of European history covering the scope of a World History or Western Civilization course. It reminds me of the expansive Will and Ariel Durant series on civilization although here it is confined to Europe alone. He posits numerous fault lines of history,

religion, and culture while initially introducing the text and simply, but intriguingly, shifts the graphic illustrations throughout the work to shift the readers perspective from the traditional North-South-East-West European continuum to one that displays maps demonstrating Europe as one huge sub-continent. In this effort, he includes Eastern European evidence that is usually not included in standard European histories. I would fault Davies for being too critical of religion and he suspiciously reports religious history, and he may be too sympathetic for internationalist sympathies in his presentation of what constitutes "Europeanness."

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LibraryThing member JBreedlove

The author takes a fascinating subjects and cuts corners with "capsules" and "snapshots". They took up space and made the book easier to write.

LibraryThing member Avril

This is really a refernce book rather than one to read from page 1 to page 1136, but it is irresistible to dip into, and always gives one the answer one is looking for. The text is enlivened by the insertion of "Capsules", gobbets of popular interest. The graffiti in the brothels of Pompeii are

particularly noteworthy.

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LibraryThing member DebbieMcCauley

This is a comprehensive book on the history of Europe from prehistory through the present. The book contains extensive notes, maps and appendices which service to bring credibility to the subject. Author Norman Davies tries to counteract the bias of ‘Eurocentrism’ and ‘Western civilization’

throughout his book. Very useful for anyone studying or interested in this topic.

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LibraryThing member JHemlock

This is one monster of a volume. It is well done, researched and put together. But it has some serious problems with the way it is laid out. The pages of side notes are informative but all together they only slow the pace of the book down. Constantly having to go back and forth and read them. You

don't want to pass them up because you do not know what you might miss. So when you attack this volume you have to make a precise battle plan on how you are going to achieve the goal of finishing it. I would give it 4 stars but 3 will have to do because of the back and forth.

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LibraryThing member Paul_S

At first I thought this would be very slow and detailed given the book's length but then very quickly realised this will have to fly through history at lightspeed - before reading this book I never realised how rich it is because most books only try to cover one aspect of it. I gorged myself on

this book for two days and it was an amazing ride through the glorious and terrifying history of Europe.

The book assumes that you haven't been sleeping through history class at school so will not spoonfeed you basic history.

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