Really dense, you must be really interested in detailed European history. ( )

Very readable overview. The Eastern European slant (especially Poland) gave a new aspect even to the bits of history I thought I knew already. ( )

I particularly appreciate the dedication of major portions of the book to Eastern Europe. There were moments when I thought I would like more detail about certain events, such as the French Revolution, but I remembered it's a one volume treatment of European history from the earliest times to the present. ( )

The big book that got me flagged by TSA. I was travelling to Boston recently and, as always before a trip, I was in the throes of anxiety over what reading material to take (I’m afraid I’m of the die-hard printed-book persuasion). With two hundred pages left to go in Davies’s sprawling tome, I didn’t want to lose the momentum of weeks of reading, so, despite its significant heft, I stuffed it into my carry-on bag. And that bag got promptly flagged and taken aside at airport security. After several questions about what might be in the bag, my anxiety growing sharper, the agent pulled out the ample brick. In the agent’s words, “this book is too dense for the scanner.” Luckily, its physical density does not also apply to its content.

Read full review here: http://www.chrisviabookreviews.com/2017/09/12/europe-a-history-1996/ ( )

In a fit of ambition five months ago at the beach in Casablanca, I downloaded and started Norman Davies’ epic Europe: A History. I’m not sure I’ve ever been quite so proud to click that “I’m Finished” button on my GoodReads update page. On my Kindle, the page count reads upwards of sixteen hundred pages. However, with the opening chapter an easily digestible introduction to the physical and prehistoric beginnings of the cultures that came to be called collectively European, I felt like the book would fly by as quickly as a book with chapters over a hundred pages could. I was wrong. That first chapter is structured, with headings and concise sections of information. Very early on, Davies throws in the trivia blurbs – while the Kindle couldn’t handle the formatting of these sections with much ease, I greatly enjoyed not only the liveliness that these somewhat informal additions of information added, but also the context they provided. Or, rather, the contexts in which they were provided – that is, I enjoyed seeing those bracketed titles over and over again throughout different epics of the book. (For better or for worse, the one that springs to mind first is the “Condom” one – it comes up in the middle ages, later on in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, and then again in the twentieth century.) Not all of them reappear throughout the ages, but the ones that do provide a nice line of progress (or anti-progress, as the case may be) over the centuries. Apart from that first chapter and the numerous brief interruptions that keep it ever so mildly entertaining, the whole middle section turns to mush. He rushes through plenty of the more interesting parts of the Greek and Roman empires (including the civil war) only to harp on for what feels like forever about the Holy Roman Empire. Commendably, he includes much detail about the countries of Eastern Europe. Regrettably, I missed whatever initial introduction there may have been and spent most of the middle of the book confused and bored. I struggled to find the storyline. I only followed the timeline of the Eastern Europe toward the last couple chapters, and at that point, I’m fairly sure it was just excitement about having only a handful (uh, relative term) of pages left. I did enjoy the last two chapters, though – even when he glossed over major events like the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in half a sentence. By the end, I kind of felt like I needed to reread the whole middle part (not any time soon, mind you) because I had grasped the cultures and the personalities in those chapters even with a very hazy background. Davies’ Europe: A History reviewed much of the information I’d learned years ago in AP World History back in high school in almost an equally boring fashion, but the interjectory plates added a bit more interest to a painfully unstructured book. ( )