Customer Comments

I actually found the structure fairly repetitive and the writing rather uninspired. Factually, the material was quite interesting but there were a few points that the author seemed to believe that the reader should be hit with repeatedly and the result is that in reading the book straight through, I felt rather preached to. Really I think the historical material stands on its own and I found the author's style to be rather obtrusive.

I was quite surprised by my reaction to this book. I was largely unable to become interested because the characters felt somehow stilted. In several cases, the dialog particularly struck me as almost pedantic. Now, I am generally the last person to demand high levels of realism from an author and try to follow the author's path to see what they have to say. Here, I felt rather like I was being shown that the author could do high minded literary work, and as a result, the spoken words of the characters often had a kind of self consciously high drama to them that felt unnatural. Because the 'unnatural' didn't feel deliberate, the dialog often felt flat. Many aspects of the writing are indeed compelling but the overall effect was lost on me.