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Curious Chester: Portrait of an English City Over Two Thousand Years
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 17, 2014
This could and should have been a riveting book that it'd be hard to put down. However, thanks to some reasons I will go into shortly, it was actually the other way around.
Chester is my hometown and, being a history lover, I have a keen interest in whatever I can possibly glean about where I still live.
There is plenty of interesting things I did pick up from this book, even if most of it was already known to me, but it is let down by some significant flaws.
The first, and most striking one, is the incredibly bizarre decision - possibly on the part of the publishers - to go with such a slapdash font & design layout. The whole, literally entire, book is printed to look as if it has been handwritten by someone as their high school homework which, far from being quirky or fun, is actually a detriment as it makes it feel incredibly amateurish and makes you automatically doubt the integrity of what you're reading.
It rapidly gets to the point that by only a dozen pages in, you're already skimming ahead to save having to digest any more crudely drawn diagrams or sloppy handwritten text.
There are also some notable errors, such as the strong implication that Aethelflaeda was the Queen of King Alfred's successor. This is not strictly true as it would not only have meant the unification of two separate kingdom's but it would also have been deeply incestuous. Alfred was king of Wessex, and though the King of Mercia, Aethelflaeda's husband, was seen as his vassal, Mercia remained a separate territory. Alfred's successor was his son Edward, who was Aethelflaeda's younger brother.
The book also, for some unknown reason, calls Harold Godwineson's wife Algitha, even though it's widely accepted that both his wives/mistresses names were Gytha aka Ealdgyth (which became Edith), not Algitha.
All in all, this should have been a better, more enjoyable read but was scuppered by it's utterlly appalling delivery to the extent that I would actually advise people to avoid this book and go pick up any number of other books on the history of this two thousand year old city. You'll not only get a much more thorough, conclusive deal but also one which won't look incredibly like a 14 year old schoolboy has knocked it up for his homework.
Chester is my hometown and, being a history lover, I have a keen interest in whatever I can possibly glean about where I still live.
There is plenty of interesting things I did pick up from this book, even if most of it was already known to me, but it is let down by some significant flaws.
The first, and most striking one, is the incredibly bizarre decision - possibly on the part of the publishers - to go with such a slapdash font & design layout. The whole, literally entire, book is printed to look as if it has been handwritten by someone as their high school homework which, far from being quirky or fun, is actually a detriment as it makes it feel incredibly amateurish and makes you automatically doubt the integrity of what you're reading.
It rapidly gets to the point that by only a dozen pages in, you're already skimming ahead to save having to digest any more crudely drawn diagrams or sloppy handwritten text.
There are also some notable errors, such as the strong implication that Aethelflaeda was the Queen of King Alfred's successor. This is not strictly true as it would not only have meant the unification of two separate kingdom's but it would also have been deeply incestuous. Alfred was king of Wessex, and though the King of Mercia, Aethelflaeda's husband, was seen as his vassal, Mercia remained a separate territory. Alfred's successor was his son Edward, who was Aethelflaeda's younger brother.
The book also, for some unknown reason, calls Harold Godwineson's wife Algitha, even though it's widely accepted that both his wives/mistresses names were Gytha aka Ealdgyth (which became Edith), not Algitha.
All in all, this should have been a better, more enjoyable read but was scuppered by it's utterlly appalling delivery to the extent that I would actually advise people to avoid this book and go pick up any number of other books on the history of this two thousand year old city. You'll not only get a much more thorough, conclusive deal but also one which won't look incredibly like a 14 year old schoolboy has knocked it up for his homework.
Displaying 1 of 1 review