All you ever wanted to know about fortifications but never asked

by Walls and Gardens

An introduction to the history of fortifications and their building technology.

Genres: History, Military Fiction, Nonfiction

210 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 8, 2015

Reviews

[Xan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un libro sencillo, sin alardes, que sirve a su propósito de introducir a cualquier aficonado al arte de las fortificaciones militares.
El nivel de inglés es asequible, sobre todo si se conocen algunos términos militares. Los grabados y fotografías son útiles y de buena calidad para un lector electrónico.

[Adrian K Winham · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice book

This is a nice book and informative, but seems to be written by a mid level college student noted from the grammar used. I did like the information conveyed. Worth reading if interested about learning fortification techniques and maintenance.

[Otherwyrld · Rating 2 out of 5]

The early part of this book showed promise as it started very basically with the reasons why places are fortified. Unfortunately this promise didn't last long, and by about a third of the way through had given up talking about fortifications in favour of discussing who was fighting whom during the 16th and 17th centuries.

The book rallied a bit in the latter half, then fell apart again when it spent a good amount of space with potted biographies of various engineers, plus a bibliography that really added very little.

Part of the issue I had with this book was that much of it wasn't written in English, and the translation was very poor in places. For a book that was supposed to be talking about fortifications in general there was a lot of time spent on warfare in the Low Countries which felt too narrow and parochial to make it very interesting.

I would have liked far more on ancient and medieval fortifications as well, the book was very heavily biased towards the later part of the history of fortifications.

All in all a bit of a disappointment.

[Yazir Paredes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very simple read about castles and fortifications. Great as an introduction to the subject.