scottishvix's review against another edition
3.0
As a bit of a history buff, I love little bits of miscellany picked up from history. So when this came up in a Kindle sale, I picked it up hoping it would be interesting.
I was expecting something a little bit comic from this. But this is quite a serious book and written in that style. That, in itself is no bad thing. I do read a lot of serious, semi-academic history books and as long as they are well-written the style is not so important.
However Ms Marriott has a rather annoying habbit of repeating herself. A lot. Each segment has strats with a brief summery of the myth and the fact that it is wrong, usually in one or two paragraphs. Then she goes into a lot of detail about the facts and why the myths have come to be commonly believed. And then she summarises the myth and why it is wrong again. It is a pattern I recognise from reading scientific papers for my degree: Abstract, main body of the paper, summary/conclusion. And it is much less useful than in a proper academic paper and gets very boring when each segment is only a 10-12 pages long rather than 30+ dense pages.
Otherwise, most of the book is very informative and engaging. The small box-outs in most chapters add interesting side-notes that enhance the text. Having these, rather than foot or endnotes is much easier to navigate on a kindle. The illustrations that appear in most sections are funny and definitely add to the text. And the sections are small enough for a quick pick up and put down if you are short on time.
On the whole, it is an informative and interesting book, if you can get past the repititions.
I was expecting something a little bit comic from this. But this is quite a serious book and written in that style. That, in itself is no bad thing. I do read a lot of serious, semi-academic history books and as long as they are well-written the style is not so important.
However Ms Marriott has a rather annoying habbit of repeating herself. A lot. Each segment has strats with a brief summery of the myth and the fact that it is wrong, usually in one or two paragraphs. Then she goes into a lot of detail about the facts and why the myths have come to be commonly believed. And then she summarises the myth and why it is wrong again. It is a pattern I recognise from reading scientific papers for my degree: Abstract, main body of the paper, summary/conclusion. And it is much less useful than in a proper academic paper and gets very boring when each segment is only a 10-12 pages long rather than 30+ dense pages.
Otherwise, most of the book is very informative and engaging. The small box-outs in most chapters add interesting side-notes that enhance the text. Having these, rather than foot or endnotes is much easier to navigate on a kindle. The illustrations that appear in most sections are funny and definitely add to the text. And the sections are small enough for a quick pick up and put down if you are short on time.
On the whole, it is an informative and interesting book, if you can get past the repititions.
camillalice's review against another edition
2.0
It wasn't a fascinating read. I knew most of what the author mentioned and it doesn't go into much detail.
meenaz's review
3.0
The book makes for an interesting read. If one is not aware that history is often a matter of who gets to narrate the tale, this book might introduce them solidly to the idea. For people who are familiar with this idea, the book may not do much. The book elucidates several instances of how popularly believed historical understandings are more myth than fact, but in several cases, it does not go much into why, despite being far from the truth, the historical myth continues to be more durable. So, in my view, it certainly fails in explaining 'how' we got the past wrong. All it manages to say is that we get history wrong more often than what we may want to believe.
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