monica_r_jae's review against another edition
4.0
A thorough look at southern Africa and the Zulu wars. It sparked my interest in African history, including the Boer wars and aboriginal african combat.
jhg1995's review against another edition
5.0
A wonderful introduction to the awesome culture of the Zulus. Instead of Wakanda 4ever, it should be Zululand 4ever!
reverenddave's review against another edition
4.0
There are moments in this book that reveal its 1960s era writing, but beyond that it is a stellar and thorough history of the Zulus and a must read if you want to place the events of the Anglo-Zulu War in the proper context.
evamadera1's review against another edition
3.0
A review from my old blog...
I give a warning at the beginning. This is a book for history nerds only. :D
While this book took me quite some time to read (because of the enormous length--614 pages--and because of Election Day interruptions) I enjoyed the book.
At the same time it was quite a chore to read. The only reason that the book seemed to make sense to me was because I took a class on the history of Africa and watched a video of the battle that took nearly three hundred pages to recount... or at least I think it took that length.
I found myself confused as the chapters progressed and Morris sort of backtracked when he switched to a new chapter to tell about another flank or division of the British army. I apologize if I confuse anyone. I myself found myself confused by this.
In addition, the small print and large paragraphs also made the book more difficult to read through my normal method. (I tend to in depth skim :D)
I do recommend the book for anyone interested in African history, specifically South African history. I find it intriguing to consider that the province with the highest AIDS infection rate in South Africa (or pretty close to the top) is KwaZuluNatal... or the Zululand of this book.
Unless you have a history fascination or the above mentioned fascination I do not recommend the book unless you need material to fall asleep to.
I give a warning at the beginning. This is a book for history nerds only. :D
While this book took me quite some time to read (because of the enormous length--614 pages--and because of Election Day interruptions) I enjoyed the book.
At the same time it was quite a chore to read. The only reason that the book seemed to make sense to me was because I took a class on the history of Africa and watched a video of the battle that took nearly three hundred pages to recount... or at least I think it took that length.
I found myself confused as the chapters progressed and Morris sort of backtracked when he switched to a new chapter to tell about another flank or division of the British army. I apologize if I confuse anyone. I myself found myself confused by this.
In addition, the small print and large paragraphs also made the book more difficult to read through my normal method. (I tend to in depth skim :D)
I do recommend the book for anyone interested in African history, specifically South African history. I find it intriguing to consider that the province with the highest AIDS infection rate in South Africa (or pretty close to the top) is KwaZuluNatal... or the Zululand of this book.
Unless you have a history fascination or the above mentioned fascination I do not recommend the book unless you need material to fall asleep to.
ravenbait's review
3.0
It's almost impossible to review this book except to say that this is dense. This book packs in more information for the word count than any book I've read before or since. It sits somewhere in a heavy lump in the depths of my memory and lurches a bit every time "Zulu" comes on the TV.
As a history of the period, I can't imagine anything more thorough. This is not, however, light bedtime reading. I could only manage a bit at a time, then had to take a break to digest it before tackling the next section, like a climber soloing El Cap.
As a history of the period, I can't imagine anything more thorough. This is not, however, light bedtime reading. I could only manage a bit at a time, then had to take a break to digest it before tackling the next section, like a climber soloing El Cap.
kerveros's review
3.0
I am having a really hard time in rating this book. First - I am not a fan of non-fiction books really so trying to judge this in comparison to other books (the main way I rate books if the rating doesn't immediately come to me) is not fair as my bases of comparison is fictional works. Second - I stopped reading this book for .... four months or so because it was so... *yawn*. So... yeah.
There are parts of this that are really good (although it is certainly not up to the same standard as other non-fiction war books I've read such as 'Nam' or 'We Were Soldiers Once and Young') but I don't think there were enough really interesting bits to make up for the fact that the main part of this (the section after Shaka but before the battles of Isandhlwana and Rorke's Drift in particular as that caused the four month hiatus) that are just far too dense.
I think this has to be a 2.5 star rating basically, but as the site doesn't allow that I'm going to bump this to 3 stars. Like I said, not my genre and this was written quite some time ago so the writing style is different. (That and honestly, I would say I liked the book overall and that is what three stars on here means!)
So, now I have worked out the rating onto actually reviewing the book (something I don't do a lot of in my reviews actually!). This book is split into two sections - the first details the 'European' colonisation of the area, the history of the natives, the rise of Shaka and events after his death but prior to the 'invasion'. Now, I found the majority of this to be interesting - the history of the Bantu especially and how Shaka was able to unify the nation. However, the book started to take a turn towards snoozeville when the focus switched to the British.
Now, I am British but... how the hell did we have an Empire??? I mean, the treatment of the soldiers was appalling, and maybe it is just me but when one problem happened the guy that was sent to fix it just did the same thing as the guy before him, and so on and so forth! It just... makes no sense to me at all. And granted, this might have been part of why I lost interest in the early part of part two of this book - aka the confederation chapter.
Part two of the book deals with the reasons why the invasion/war was 'needed', the preparations for the invasion, the events of the invasions and the aftermath. Ultimately I'd say that generally this was an interesting section of the book - if you remove the chapters called Confederation and Preparations. These sections seem to deal with political wrangling so if you find that kind of thing interesting you might enjoy those, if on the other hand you hate politics - definitely not your chapters.
I found the chapter about Isandhlwana interesting, only because I had never heard of it. Perhaps it is just me, but I kind of feel that rather than spending so much time on the Tudors, Stuarts etcetera in History class maybe it would have made sense to spend some time on more modern events - especially on a battle that is described as being worse than Custers Land Stand in the US (and is according to Wikipedia still the "single greatest defeat for the British Army at the hands of a native army"). It might have just been my curriculum but I am pretty sure we never actually spent any time on the Victorian era. I know we did the early history of the UK, but I honestly don't think we ever covered anything to do with the British Empire unless it related to WW1 and WW2 - the Boer War I know was merely a passing reference as to why we were involved in WW1 in the first place. Now I know this is not the Boer War but surely such events should be more than footnotes in our history?
Ah well... the Rorke's Drift chapter was, I think, my favourite in that I had seen parts of Zulu numerous times (though not all the way through) and reading about the actual events was really interesting (having now watched the film fully for the first time ever having read this, and assuming the book to be accurate - the film takes a few (a lot) liberties with the events but is generally (I think) well portrayed)). I'm actually going to be skimming through that section again now as I don't recall it mentioning Chard who is a key character in the film.
I also found the section on the Imperial Prince to be interesting - I had heard of Eugenie but had no idea who she actually was.
Now, I mentioned accuracy... well, there are some elements of this book that I read and I wonder how the hell the author knows that information - now he provides what looks to be an extensive bibliography and comments on sources (got to love the fact that he says the Colenso's work to be rather dense!) and generally this book comes across as being well researched and un-opinionated. That said, any book written well after the period of time it discusses is going to have inaccuracies - but who can say for certain what is accurate and what isn't?
Overall, this was an informative, if not overly readable book. I doubt I will read it again but it has certainly made me more interested in this period of history (and with any luck I'll be making a return trip to the museum in Brecon which holds a lot of memorabilia from these events - I'll be better able to appreciate it now I know more about the events!)
There are parts of this that are really good (although it is certainly not up to the same standard as other non-fiction war books I've read such as 'Nam' or 'We Were Soldiers Once and Young') but I don't think there were enough really interesting bits to make up for the fact that the main part of this (the section after Shaka but before the battles of Isandhlwana and Rorke's Drift in particular as that caused the four month hiatus) that are just far too dense.
I think this has to be a 2.5 star rating basically, but as the site doesn't allow that I'm going to bump this to 3 stars. Like I said, not my genre and this was written quite some time ago so the writing style is different. (That and honestly, I would say I liked the book overall and that is what three stars on here means!)
So, now I have worked out the rating onto actually reviewing the book (something I don't do a lot of in my reviews actually!). This book is split into two sections - the first details the 'European' colonisation of the area, the history of the natives, the rise of Shaka and events after his death but prior to the 'invasion'. Now, I found the majority of this to be interesting - the history of the Bantu especially and how Shaka was able to unify the nation. However, the book started to take a turn towards snoozeville when the focus switched to the British.
Now, I am British but... how the hell did we have an Empire??? I mean, the treatment of the soldiers was appalling, and maybe it is just me but when one problem happened the guy that was sent to fix it just did the same thing as the guy before him, and so on and so forth! It just... makes no sense to me at all. And granted, this might have been part of why I lost interest in the early part of part two of this book - aka the confederation chapter.
Part two of the book deals with the reasons why the invasion/war was 'needed', the preparations for the invasion, the events of the invasions and the aftermath. Ultimately I'd say that generally this was an interesting section of the book - if you remove the chapters called Confederation and Preparations. These sections seem to deal with political wrangling so if you find that kind of thing interesting you might enjoy those, if on the other hand you hate politics - definitely not your chapters.
I found the chapter about Isandhlwana interesting, only because I had never heard of it. Perhaps it is just me, but I kind of feel that rather than spending so much time on the Tudors, Stuarts etcetera in History class maybe it would have made sense to spend some time on more modern events - especially on a battle that is described as being worse than Custers Land Stand in the US (and is according to Wikipedia still the "single greatest defeat for the British Army at the hands of a native army"). It might have just been my curriculum but I am pretty sure we never actually spent any time on the Victorian era. I know we did the early history of the UK, but I honestly don't think we ever covered anything to do with the British Empire unless it related to WW1 and WW2 - the Boer War I know was merely a passing reference as to why we were involved in WW1 in the first place. Now I know this is not the Boer War but surely such events should be more than footnotes in our history?
Ah well... the Rorke's Drift chapter was, I think, my favourite in that I had seen parts of Zulu numerous times (though not all the way through) and reading about the actual events was really interesting (having now watched the film fully for the first time ever having read this, and assuming the book to be accurate - the film takes a few (a lot) liberties with the events but is generally (I think) well portrayed)). I'm actually going to be skimming through that section again now as I don't recall it mentioning Chard who is a key character in the film.
I also found the section on the Imperial Prince to be interesting - I had heard of Eugenie but had no idea who she actually was.
Now, I mentioned accuracy... well, there are some elements of this book that I read and I wonder how the hell the author knows that information - now he provides what looks to be an extensive bibliography and comments on sources (got to love the fact that he says the Colenso's work to be rather dense!) and generally this book comes across as being well researched and un-opinionated. That said, any book written well after the period of time it discusses is going to have inaccuracies - but who can say for certain what is accurate and what isn't?
Overall, this was an informative, if not overly readable book. I doubt I will read it again but it has certainly made me more interested in this period of history (and with any luck I'll be making a return trip to the museum in Brecon which holds a lot of memorabilia from these events - I'll be better able to appreciate it now I know more about the events!)
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