Reviews

Readers should not be daunted by the ambitious timeframe of this first installment of Schama's (Rembrandt's Eyes) two-volume, popular history of Britain, which will accompany the History Channel's upcoming seven-part series. The author makes quick work of 3000 years of pre-Roman Britain, dispensing with the Iron Age in the first seven pages (roughly the same amount of space he grants the far racier trial and execution of Mary, Queen of Scots). This anecdote-driven narrative, complemented by 150 full-color illustrations and unencumbered by footnotes, steps on such familiar stones as the Norman Conquest, the War of the Roses, the Reformation, and the reign of Elizabeth I, whose death closes the account. Schama depicts a Roman encampment along Hadrian's Wall and the effects of the Black Death on 14th-century society, yet his eye is invariably drawn to the monarchy and nobility, whose deeds he describes in an engaging manner that only occasionally misfires (e.g., of Henry VIII, he notes that "you could practically smell the testosterone"). It is Schama's compelling, popular style, rather than new scholarship, that distinguishes this work from Michael Wood's In Search of England: Journeys into England's Past (Univ. of California, 2000) or Roy Strong's The Story of Britain (LJ 3/1/00), and the TV series will ensure demand. The second volume, A History of Britain: The Fate of Empire, is due in the spring of 2001. Recommended for public and academic libraries. (Index not seen.)DRichard Koss, "Library Journal" Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

One suspects that Schama harbors a secret desire to be the Venerable Bede, whom he describes as a "consummate English story-teller, an artful retailer of wonders, a writer of brilliantly imaginative prose." In earlier works on the French Revolution (Citizens) and the golden age of Holland (The Embarrassment of Riches), he perfected his balance: market appeal is never sacrificed to condescension. This new volume is a model of literate elegance, enlivened by good humor and bursts of pugilistic directness: "The Faerie had warts all right," he writes of Elizabeth I. His task is not easy: British national identity is no longer axiomatic. Schama steers away from a Churchillian litany of patriotic glories, and from the revisionist pieties of the Left. In practice, this means, that unlike Landscape and Memory and Dead Certainties, this is not a work of great conceptual boldness. Its strengths lie rather in the detail. From his opening chapter, in which a prehistoric Orkney community is described as a "seaside village," Schama is ever alert to the unexpected. We learn that Hadrian's wall, far from being an impregnable fence, was designed to control the flow of men and goods; that Saint Patrick was not Irish (he was "a Romano-British aristocrat" by birth); and that the Battle of Hastings, at six hours, was one of the longest of battles in medieval history. His book has all the hallmarks that he admires in Bede, his medieval forebear: vigor of language, the capacity to evoke and clear-eyed common sense. (Oct.) market. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.