deborahrosegreen's review against another edition
adventurous
informative
inspiring
reflective
4.0
This was an enjoyable, up-to-date memoir about one of the longest inhabited islands in the world. Unsworth describes every location he visits in descriptive and historical detail. His experiences mirrored many of my own from my visit to Heraklion and Spinalonga. The writing style is concise and engaging. I strongly recommend this book to anyone who wants an overview of the island for research or holiday purposes.
the_slackening's review against another edition
1.0
My god this was brutal. I grabbed this book because it's just called "Crete". I'm like, alright, I'll learn about that island, I'm sure there's cool stuff in its history. Well guess what? It's basically an unsourced travel memoir by this rando who has no fucking gusto. Holy shit he literally sounds like this is the worst vacation he's ever taken. Never excited about anything except trashing the locals' own history of their place. Seriously, it's a joke. All he does is talk about some Greek myths and their relations to the island, then add some history about the Turks. This book is terrible.
brenticus's review against another edition
informative
reflective
slow-paced
1.0
I don't really know what this book was trying to be. To a certain extent it was a travel memoir covering the author's trip to Crete with his wife, in which he seems to mostly enjoy staying away from other people, complaining about development of the island, and visiting churches. It also discussed quite a lot of historical minutiae about Crete's various occupations by foreign entities, some relevant facts about whatever site he was visiting, and occasional anecdotes about the local culture.
By trying to cover literally everything I felt like Unsworth failed to actually tell me anything about what it's like to visit Crete. When he's not in a run-on sentence about how the sunlight hits just right on Crete, he's talking about how amazing the Cretan people are for being oppressed for their entire history or bemoaning the state of whatever area he's in. Twice he stays in some big hotel far from amenities. I don't know where those hotels were because it feels like he barely talks about the places he's in other than how the hotel sucks, but I know the big hotels are a blight on Crete, I guess.
The writing style was really difficult for me to deal with. Every couple of pages I would come across a sentence with so many commas I couldn't figure out what it was trying to say. I continually lost track of what was being discussed as a paragraph twisted into some historical tangent. I don't think any of it was exactly grammatically incorrect, but it felt like another look by an editor would have helped me a lot.
I guess what I took from this book is that if I'm going to read a travel book, I'd rather it remain focused on travel. Janissaries, while exciting in their own right, maybe don't have much effect on my beach vacation.
By trying to cover literally everything I felt like Unsworth failed to actually tell me anything about what it's like to visit Crete. When he's not in a run-on sentence about how the sunlight hits just right on Crete, he's talking about how amazing the Cretan people are for being oppressed for their entire history or bemoaning the state of whatever area he's in. Twice he stays in some big hotel far from amenities. I don't know where those hotels were because it feels like he barely talks about the places he's in other than how the hotel sucks, but I know the big hotels are a blight on Crete, I guess.
The writing style was really difficult for me to deal with. Every couple of pages I would come across a sentence with so many commas I couldn't figure out what it was trying to say. I continually lost track of what was being discussed as a paragraph twisted into some historical tangent. I don't think any of it was exactly grammatically incorrect, but it felt like another look by an editor would have helped me a lot.
I guess what I took from this book is that if I'm going to read a travel book, I'd rather it remain focused on travel. Janissaries, while exciting in their own right, maybe don't have much effect on my beach vacation.
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