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Title: Samurai Warriors
Author: Stephen Turnbull
Genre: History (Japan 672-1876)
Thingummies: 2.5
Synopsis: A somewhat hasty and disjointed overview of samurai, with a lot of color plates.
Thingummies: The author phoned this one in.
The back of this book mentions that this imprint also published several other such books, including The Barbarians, Celtic Warlord, and Medieval Warlords. So it's fairly obvious that the author was invited to contribute to what's effectively a series. Repeatedly throughout the book, he leaves off interesting explanations to mention that he covers this in greater depth in one of his several other books on the history of the samurai.
Unfortunately, I think most of the interesting things must be in those books.
This book suffers from trying to cover far too much ground in far too few pages. There are extensive color illustrations, reproductions of Japanese prints, photographs, and maps. These plates very rarely connect at all to the text, however. And their inclusion leaves little space on each page for narrative. So there is the text, a greatest hits compilation of battles awash with unended, similar names, and the illustrations, containing entirely different names but whose captions instead seem to be an unrelated history of samurai armor. The two basically do not reference each other, so you're effectively trying to read two books at once.
Because there's so little room, almost everything is context-free. We get lists of battles without much explanation of the social structure behind them. We get a lot of names of people fighting in the battles, but no real biographies of the (extremely interesting) people. Politics play a huge role, but are never fully explained. The illustrations show the evolution of armor and weaponry, but there's no discussion of why it changed or how those changes affected the battles being fought on the pages around the illustration. It feels like an extended version of an eighth-grader's history report--all lists of facts with no connections or interpretations. Since, to a Westerner's ear, many of the names are similar and we aren't often given much in the way of identifying characteristics, most of these facts just slide right through your brain without leaving much impact. What stuck for me were only things closely related to history I already knew (some about the Heian period and what information the Samurai Warriors video game and one excellent armor show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art taught me about the Warring States period). It doesn't help that this has the same problems as a lot of European history, with a limited repetoire of personal names and a lot of important families who have different members who keep cropping up in different roles over two or three centuries. I'm not sure I've learned much new at all, which is a pity.
Also unfortunate is the fact that the loving plates are rather dated in style and color choices. There's some serious perspective problems--I can't tell whether the artist was inspired by the stylized poses of Japanese prints or whether he just wasn't very good at drawing necks.
In short--I think I learned more from Wikipedia. Not a good recommendation for a history book.
Author: Stephen Turnbull
Genre: History (Japan 672-1876)
Thingummies: 2.5
Synopsis: A somewhat hasty and disjointed overview of samurai, with a lot of color plates.
Thingummies: The author phoned this one in.
The back of this book mentions that this imprint also published several other such books, including The Barbarians, Celtic Warlord, and Medieval Warlords. So it's fairly obvious that the author was invited to contribute to what's effectively a series. Repeatedly throughout the book, he leaves off interesting explanations to mention that he covers this in greater depth in one of his several other books on the history of the samurai.
Unfortunately, I think most of the interesting things must be in those books.
This book suffers from trying to cover far too much ground in far too few pages. There are extensive color illustrations, reproductions of Japanese prints, photographs, and maps. These plates very rarely connect at all to the text, however. And their inclusion leaves little space on each page for narrative. So there is the text, a greatest hits compilation of battles awash with unended, similar names, and the illustrations, containing entirely different names but whose captions instead seem to be an unrelated history of samurai armor. The two basically do not reference each other, so you're effectively trying to read two books at once.
Because there's so little room, almost everything is context-free. We get lists of battles without much explanation of the social structure behind them. We get a lot of names of people fighting in the battles, but no real biographies of the (extremely interesting) people. Politics play a huge role, but are never fully explained. The illustrations show the evolution of armor and weaponry, but there's no discussion of why it changed or how those changes affected the battles being fought on the pages around the illustration. It feels like an extended version of an eighth-grader's history report--all lists of facts with no connections or interpretations. Since, to a Westerner's ear, many of the names are similar and we aren't often given much in the way of identifying characteristics, most of these facts just slide right through your brain without leaving much impact. What stuck for me were only things closely related to history I already knew (some about the Heian period and what information the Samurai Warriors video game and one excellent armor show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art taught me about the Warring States period). It doesn't help that this has the same problems as a lot of European history, with a limited repetoire of personal names and a lot of important families who have different members who keep cropping up in different roles over two or three centuries. I'm not sure I've learned much new at all, which is a pity.
Also unfortunate is the fact that the loving plates are rather dated in style and color choices. There's some serious perspective problems--I can't tell whether the artist was inspired by the stylized poses of Japanese prints or whether he just wasn't very good at drawing necks.
In short--I think I learned more from Wikipedia. Not a good recommendation for a history book.
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no subject
Date: 2011-08-29 02:28 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2011-08-29 11:59 am (UTC)From:Going by ratings in the past, I'm giving 2s to books that intensely annoy me and 1s to complete and utter failures. This was just kind of disappointing.