Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I learned about the book from a reviewer in the Economist who claimed that "there was not a lazy sentence in the book". If there is, I didn't find it in 989 pages of text and notes. I just loved it. I so hated to put it down that I spent an extra hour going through his endnotes and suggestions for further reading. He has a gift for historical narrative. Many historians seem to think their readers know nothing and spend so much time on setting the stage, defining terms, and reciting facts that they bore you to death in the first chapter. At the opposite extreme are historians who think their audience is primarily specialists they debate at conferences and who kill you with minutia and tendentious disputation. Tombs is the truly the "mama bear" who gets it just right. He just seems to have an instinct for knowing when and where to bear down and/or lighten up in his narrative. Also, he doesn't judge the past by the insights and values of the present, a common failing of modern and post-modern historians. He doesn't flaunt his preferences; neither does he hide them. His judgments of things English are nearly always presented in a comparative perspective. He offers what must be dozens of "historical factoids" but without interfering with his narrative and nearly always relating such data to a regional or historical context. I think he did a particularly good job of explicating the factual and moral complexities of the English civil war and the later battles between Whigs and Tories, both in terms of ideas and personalities. If he gets just a tiny bit partisan about English virtues, it might be in his extensive coverage of English opposition (often costly) to the slave trade and chattel slavery. But then again, who could blame him? Read the book. You won't be disappointed.