A review by scottishvix
Bad History: How We Got the Past Wrong by Emma Marriott
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.