With more than 200 colorful pages of castles/citadels and a brief description of each one’s history, this book is one of the most thorough I’ve seen of its kind. I gained so much insight into the past. I learned how some of the castles/citadels were built, why they were built, why a particular location was chosen, who served while they stood, when some of them were destroyed and then rebuilt and what some of them were used for then and now. Despite my understanding that all castles were built for protection as fortresses, I learned that some were built to be palaces or hunting cabins and intended to show wealth. One was noted to have held slaves and another to have been a concentration camp. One castle was built on a man-made island that had been constructed from layers and layers of wood. As some one who has lived in Europe and visited several castles I had no idea of the number and variety of castles that existed across the world. While many of the well known ones are quite elaborate, others were built from cardboard or wood and quite simple. I was fascinated to see the detail shown in some of the photos of Castles (or what remained of them) dating back to the Bronze age and up to the present. Some were views of the inside, others were views from the top, some were up close and others from a distance to show the large expanse of the entire castle. Among the locations highlighted in this book are: Albania, Belgium, Cuba, Egypt, Ghana, Greece, Iran, Iraq, Korea, South Korea, Spain, Moroco, Ukraine, Lithuania, Russia, Romania, Tibet, Macedonia, Yemen, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates.
I highly recommended this book to others that are fascinated with castles, history and travel. I know I have added many to the list of places I will visit in the future.