| Title | : | Eyewitness to History |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0380729687 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780380729685 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 752 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1987 |
Civilization's most momentous events come vibrantly alive in this magnificent collection of over three hundred eyewitness accounts spanning twenty-four turbulent centuries -- remarkable recollections of battles, atrocities, disasters, coronations, assassinations and discoveries that shaped the course of history, all related in vivid detail by observers on the scene.
Eyewitness to History Reviews
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Looking at the other editions, this book seems to have also been published under the title Eyewitness to History. It is, as the title(s) suggest(s), a collection of first-hand reports. Most are only a few pages long, and as they are all self-contained, the book is one that you can pick up and set down as you please. It’s not a bad book to have around if you have 10 minutes to spare - you can usually read a couple of the entries in that time. In total it’s a pretty hefty tome. I read the Kindle edition which at the time of writing isn’t listed on GR. Whilst the paperback version is described here as having 686 pages, my Kindle version ran to 1,062 pages, not including the list of sources and the index. The book was published in 1987, which unfortunately means it doesn’t contain reports from the momentous year of 1989. It opens with Thucydides’ description of a plague in Athens in 430BC and closes with an account of the fall of President Marcos of The Philippines in 1986.
Despite those opening and closing chapters, you can tell that this is a book published in Britain, with a British editor. The reports include a disproportionate number of incidents that either occur in Britain or at least involve British people in other countries. There will always be disagreement over the selection of material for a collection like this, but in my opinion there’s also an over-concentration on descriptions of wartime events. WW2 takes up an enormous section, but many other wars are included as well. Lastly, and possibly as a consequence of the emphasis on WW2, almost half the statements in the book are taken from the 20th century.
There were probably about a dozen or so of the accounts which I had read before.
There are so many accounts in here it is difficult to pick out individual examples. I was astonished to read a letter from Oliver Cromwell to his brother-in-law after the Battle of Marston Moor in 1644. He starts by speaking of how the Parliamentarians had won a glorious victory, thanks to be God etc. In the middle of the letter he suddenly, and with no preamble, says “Sir, God hath taken away your eldest son by a cannon-shot. It brake his leg. We were necessitated to have it cut off, whereof he died”. That was that!
There’s a great deal of tragedy described. I found one of the most affecting to be the death of an 8-year-old chimney sweep in 1813, burned and suffocated after being sent down a still-hot chimney, into which he got stuck.
A piece from Robert Graves, from 1915, described the incredible courage of a “tender-hearted lance-corporal named Baxter”, who walked out on his own into No-Man’s Land on the Western Front, waving a handkerchief, to go to a wounded soldier trapped close to the German lines. Initially the Germans fired at him but eventually they let him come on. Graves recommended Baxter for the Victoria Cross, but “the authorities thought it worth no more than a Distinguished Conduct Medal.”
Lighter events included a description of the “frost fairs” held on the frozen River Thames during the 17th century, and an account of near-farcical events during the funeral of King George II in 1760, an interesting contrast to the precision of the military manoeuvres during the recent funeral of Elizabeth II.
I can’t imagine the amount of research that would have been required to put this collection together. -
It is history these accounts offer, but history deprived of generalizations. The writers are strangers to omniscience. The varnish of interpretation has been removed so we can see people clearly, as they originally were – gazing incredulously at what was, for that moment, the newest thing that had ever happened to them.
Made up of nearly three hundred contemporaneous accounts,
Eyewitness to History gives a truly fascinating insight into what people were thinking in the moment while experiencing those events from the past 2500 years that we still talk about today. Edited by Oxford professor and renowned literary critic John Carey, and initially released in 1987, my only complaint would be that these accounts are overwhelmingly written by white men – too often recounting battle scenes that failed to engage me – but I understand that this reflects the interests of the book's editor and the ethos of its time; I wouldn't want this book itself to be changed but I would be interested in reading other books of this type with more varied points-of-view. Thoroughly valuable romp through history, as recorded by the folks who were there to witness it.
These essays range in length from less than a page to ten pages, and feature everything from transcribed court proceedings to the reportage of well-known authors. I didn't know what to expect when I first picked this up, and while I didn't find anything particularly interesting about Julius Caesar's account of invading Britain, the ensuing piece about the burning of Rome in 64 AD was riveting (the perverse Nero may not have been fiddling, but it was rumoured that the Emperor took to the “stage, and comparing modern calamities with ancient, had sung of the destruction of Troy”). And although I intended to just dip in and out of this book, it became hard to put down when the pieces that immediately followed included an eyewitness account of the eruption of Vesuvius, a dinner with Attila the Hun, a Viking funeral (the poor girl sacrificed to accompany her dead master! The string of the master's friends who lay with her, saying they did this only for the love of their dead friend!), and then the Green Children of East Anglia. Every story short but fascinating; what matter one more, and then another? Read this as you will: seven hundred pages go by pretty quickly. Some of my favourite bits (which I am collecting here for myself; this is far too long for others to read):
Plato reporting on the death of Socrates in 399 BC: When he was implored by his friends to wait as long as possible before drinking the court-ordered hemlock, Socrates replied, “I think I should gain nothing by taking the poison a little later. I should only make myself ridiculous in my own eyes if I clung to life and spared it, when there is no more profit in it.”
I could not help but be particularly moved by women's stories, even if by necessity recorded by men, so we have the cruelty of the Great Mogul (Jahangir) towards a wife in 1618, as witnessed by Edward Terry: “For his cruelties, he put one of his women to a miserable death; one of his women he had formerly touched and kept company with, but now she was superannuated; for neither himself nor nobles (as they say) come near their wives or women after they exceed the age of thirty.” (The death itself involved this woman being buried in the sand up to her neck and left in the hot sun to die.)
There is a description of the various regional methods that Hindu women employed for suttee, written in 1650 by Jean-Baptiste Tavernier: “This miserable condition causes her to detest life, and prefer to ascend a funeral pile to be consumed with her deceased husband, rather than be regarded by all the world for the remainder of her days with opprobrium and infamy.”
There's a harrowing first-person account of a mastectomy performed without anesthetic, written by Fanny Burney in 1811: “When the dreadful steel was plunged into the breast – cutting through veins – arteries – flesh – nerves – I needed no injunctions not to restrain my cries. I began a scream that lasted unintermittently during the whole time of the incision – & I almost marvel that it rings not in my Ears still!”
A suffragette (the Lady Constance Lytton, disguised as a lower-class woman) is force-fed during a hunger strike in Walton Gaol in 1910: Laying in her own vomit afterwards, exhausted and “quite helpless”, Lytton writes, “Before long I heard the sounds of the forced feeding in the next cell to mine. It was almost more than I could bear, it was Elaine Howey, I was sure. When the ghastly process was all over and all quiet, I tapped on the wall and called out at the top of my voice, which wasn't much just then, 'No surrender,' and there came the answer past any doubt in Elaine's voice, 'No surrender.'"
Henry G. Wales reports on the execution by firing squad of Mata Hari in 1917: “She seemed to collapse. Slowly, inertly, she settled to her knees, her head up always, and without the slightest change of expression on her face. For the fraction of a second it seemed she tottered there, on her knees, gazing directly at those who had taken her life. Then she fell backwards, bending at the waist, with her legs doubled up beneath her. She lay prone, motionless, with her face turned towards the sky.”
A woman is stoned to death in Jeddah in 1958, as recorded by R. M. Macoll: After her male partner had been quickly and mercifully beheaded, the woman was given one hundred debilitating blows with a stick, and while lying sagged on her side, a crowd of men and boys began pelting her with stones. “It was difficult to determine how she was facing her last and awful ordeal, since she was veiled in Muslim fashion and her mouth was gagged to muffle her cries...It took just over an hour before the doctor in attendance, who halted the stoning periodically to feel the victim's pulse, announced her dead.”
And there were so many fascinating literary references, as with the open-air cremation of Percy Shelley, written by Edward John Trelawny in 1822: “The only portions that were not consumed were some fragments of bones, the jaw, and the skull, but what surprised us all, was that the heart remained entire. In snatching this relic from the fiery furnace, my hand was severely burnt; and had anyone seen me do the act I should have been put into quarantine.”
George Bernard Shaw, writing about his mother's funeral in 1914, begins with, “Why does a funeral always sharpen one's sense of humour and rouse one's spirits?” And after humourously describing his mother's cremation – making plain that she would have joined in on the laughter – GBS concludes with, “O grave, where is thy victory?”
George Orwell was shot during the Spanish Civil War in 1937 and the entire account is fascinating. “There seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of light all round me, and I felt a tremendous shock – no pain, only a violent shock, such as you get from an electric terminal; with it a sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and shrivelled up to nothing. The sandbags in front of me receded into immense distance. I fancy you would feel much the same if you were struck by lightning. I knew immediately that I was hit, but because of the seeming bang and flash I thought it was a rifle nearby that had gone off accidentally and shot me. All this happened in the space of time much less than a second. The next moment my knees crumpled up and I was falling, my head hitting the ground with a violent bang which, to my relief, did not hurt. I had a numb, dazed feeling, a consciousness of being very badly hurt, but no pain in the ordinary sense.”
I was intrigued by Walt Whitman's description of the assassination of President Lincoln in 1865 and was thoroughly entertained by Mark Twain's breaking of a quarantine to visit the Acropolis in Athens in 1867. On the other hand, I wasn't much moved by Charles Dickens' account of a guillotining in Rome (1845) or Charlotte Bronte's visit to the Crystal Palace (1851). I don't know if the brief contributions by the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry Fielding, or Ernest Hemingway would have been included if they weren't well-known names. Further, I was a bit turned off by Gustave Flaubert's story of cavorting with Egyptian “dancing girls” in 1850 and totally disturbed by Paul Gauguin's story of how he (“nearly an old man”) came to “marry” a thirteen-year-old Tahitian girl in 1892.
There are many famines recounted (spoiler: famines always lead to cannibalism) and many accounts of cruel and inhumane behaviour (from the rapacious Spanish conquering the New World, to American slavery, bull-baiting, and factory conditions in Britain). There are enlightening eyewitness accounts of those people and places in history that we think we already understand: whirling Dervishes (1613); a survivor's story from a lethal night spent in the Black Hole of Calcutta (1756); Samuel Pepys describes the Fire of London in 1666 and Jack London describes the earthquake, and ensuing fires, that decimated San Francisco in 1906; H. M. Stanley recounts the entire day leading up to him famously inquiring, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” There are numerous executions (from the beheading of Mary Queen of Scots, the massacre of Tsar Nicholas II's family, to the Nazis sentenced to hanging after the Nuremberg Trials), scientific reports (Charles Darwin in the Galapagos, Captain Scott's South Pole Expedition, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon), and frequent slice of life essays (derbys and hunts, the Louis-Schmeling fight in 1938, a man loses a foot trying to hop a train to Winnipeg in 1899).
There was more about Trafalgar and Napoleon and the World Wars than suited my tastes, but there were often nuggets that piqued my interest even in the battle stories: Lord Nelson playfully putting a spyglass to his blind eye and reporting that he couldn't see his commander's semaphored orders to "close action" (and later, Nelson's drawn-out death – now one-armed, one-eyed, with a bullet in his spine – and his oft-repeated, “Thank God, I have done my duty”); the commander of a U-Boat in 1916 lamenting the imminent loss of the beautiful horses he could see on board the steamer he was about to torpedo; a sixteen-year-old apprentice pipe fitter witnessed the bombing of Pearl Harbor (and refused an officer's orders to go alone onto the burning Pennsylvania and attempt to put its fires out; the kid wasn't even in the army but later faced a military tribunal over this incident); flying in a plane accompanying the superfortress The Great Artiste on its way to bomb Nagasaki (“It is a thing of beauty to behold, this 'gadget'. Into its design went millions of man-hours of what is without doubt the most concentrated intellectual effort in history. Never before had so much brain power been focused on a single problem.”), written by William T. Lawrence, one of the architects of said “gadget”. I wasn't interested in much regarding the Korean or Vietnam Wars, but was interested in a Veterans' protest march on Washington D.C. in 1971 (“The truth is out! Mickey Mouse is dead! The good guys are really the bad guys in disguise!”) The final entry is on the fall of President Marcos of the Philippines in 1986, and by this point, it was obvious that I was reading the work of a professional reporter, and I have to admit that I liked the more amateur (unpolished) accounts better.
Overall: This was a fascinating journey through history and I enjoyed pretty much the whole thing. -
This is book is the closest thing you will ever own to a time machine.
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Whether it is the death of Socrates or George Orwell being shot by a sniper in the Spanish Civil War (I didn’t know about that!), if you love history, you already know you should read original sources and not just rely on someone’s interpretation of events. This book,
Eyewitness to History, is pack-jammed with accounts of famous events and not so well-known points in history. It is just plain fun, I enjoyed almost every account. The accounts are not long, ranging from a couple paragraphs to, at most, 10 pages. Most are 1-2 pages long, easily read in less than 5-10 minutes. I read one or two every day and did not race through the book. The blurb on the front, “Wondrous, a found treasure” pretty well sums this book up. I spoilered some because of the graphic content. Lots of military events but plenty of other accounts to keep most folks interested.
Here is an account of everyday life in the Middle Ages:
A Boy Thief, 1324
On Monday [in April, 1324] at the hour of vespers John, son of William de Burgh, a boy five years old, was in the house of Richard le Latthere and had taken a parcel of wool and placed it in his cap. Emma, the wife of Richard, chastising him, struck him with her right hand under his left ear so that he cried. On hearing this, Isabella, his mother, raised the hue and carried him thence. He lingered until the hour of curfew of the same day, when he died of the blow and not of any felony. Emma forthwith fled, but where she went or who received her the jurors knew not. Afterwards she surrendered herself to the prison at Newgate.
The Spanish prove they are the equal of any when it comes to visiting horror on the New World
Spanish Atrocities in the West Indies, c. 1513—20, Bartolome de Las Casas
Las Casas, who became a Dominican missionary, was the first European to expose the oppression of the native races of Latin America He had himself taken apart in the conquest of Cuba, 1513
The only way this will be purged from America is through a bloody war:
American Slavery: Punishment of a Female Slave, New Orleans, c. 1846, Samuel Gridley Howe
The author, Samuel Gridley Howe, was a leading America educator, and a pioneer in the education of blind and handicapped children.
Some are not playing nice when they evacuate Gallipoli.
Gallipoli: The Allied Evacuation, 19 December 1915, Norman King-Wilson
The abandonment of the Gallipoli Campaign brought about the resignation of Churchill, the chief supporter of the venture.
On the morning of the 19th I got my final orders. By 8 p.m. only eleven men and myself of the FA [Field Ambulance] remained. The men in the trenches spent the last day turning every dugout into a death trap and the most innocent-looking things into infernal machines. Some dugouts would blow up when the doors were opened. A drafting table had several memorandum books lying on it each with electrical connections to an explosive charge sufficient to destroy a platoon A gramophone, wound up and with record on, ready to be started, was left in one dugout so contrived that the end of the tune meant the death of the listeners. Piles of bully beef tins, turned into diabolical engines of destruction, lay scattered about. In front of the trenches lay miles of trip mines. Hundreds of rifles lay on the top of the parapet, with string tied to trigger,…. .
Orwell is just so matter of fact describing being shot in the neck:
The Spanish Civil War: Wounded by a Fascist Sniper, near Huesca, 20 May 1937, George Orwell
I had been about ten days at the front when it happened. The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting and I think it is worth describing in detail.
It was at the corner of the parapet, at five o’clock in the morning. This was always a dangerous time, because we had the dawn at our backs, and if you stuck your head above the parapet it was clearly outlined against the sky. I was talking to the sentries preparatory to changing the guard. Suddenly, in the very middle of saying something, I felt — it is very hard to describe what I felt, though I remember it with the utmost vividness.
Roughly speaking it was the sensation of being at the centre of an explosion. There seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of light all round me, and I felt a tremendous shock — no pain, only a violent shock, such as you get from an electric terminal; with it a sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and shrivelled up to nothing. The sandbags in front of me receded into immense distance. I fancy you would feel much the same if you were struck by lightning. I knew immediately that I was hit, but because of the seeming bang and flash I thought it was a rifle nearby that had gone….more follows.
Highly recommended for your daily dose of history. -
This was a fascinating collection to dip in and out of in small doses. Reading too much of it in one sitting would have been a bit overwhelming and - certainly in the latter 20th century chapters - also somewhat depressing. Such is the perhaps unfortunate emphasis on military history and various violent episodes, particularly in the modern era, that it loses a star for my rating. There are many chapters here though also of a social history bent - including pieces from historic medical notes, notorious crimes, and also several great natural events such as Pliny the Younger on the eruption of Vesuvius, a 1724 solar eclipse, and Jack London on the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
There are many gripping and unique perspectives given throughout this book to much of human history. That said, there is precious little from African, Latin American, or Asian history (unless there is a colonial, pseudo-colonial or ex-colonial war going on...). But if it's battles, assassinations, plagues, historic firsts, executions, exploration and great acts of derring-do, advancements in technology, ritual practices, prisons, mutinies, revolutions, and sporting occasions you're after - then this is the book for you!
Many excerpts stood out, making the collection well worth it if you can find a used copy online or happen upon one in a used bookshop. There were also a fair few less memorable pieces. With just a handful shy of 300 contributions, totaling 686 pages that is inevitable. Some of my personal favourites were: Plato on the death of Socrates; 3 different eye-witness reports of the sinking of the Titanic; Dinner with Atilla the Hun in about the year 450; Oskar Kokoschka with Austrian cavalry on the Eastern Front in 1915; Noel Monks' report from Guernica - just before AND after the German bombing - incredibly moving; Cecil Brown's ship-borne report from the Japanese air & submarine attack (read sinking) of HMS Prince of Wales & HMS Repulse, in Singapore just a few days after Pearl Harbor - shocking in its rapidity; and Charlotte Bronte inside the Great Exhibition's Crystal Palace. -
I checked out this book after reading a review in A Common Reader's spring 2004 catalog.
The first-person accounts cover history from Greek and Roman times up to the middle 1980's - though coverage of any given timeframe may be uneven. It is relatively Euro/Anglo-centric, with only a few non-Western anecdotes. The mix of topics covered is also somewhat uneven - I found myself skimming many of the battle accounts - however, I imagine the source material for that type of event was more abundant than the "slice of life" accounts I found more interesting.
Some well-known names and writers are included: Pliny the Younger describes the eruption of Vesuvius, Samuel Pepys writes of the London Fire, Vespucci and de las Casas describe their impressions of the New World. Walt Whitman recalls the assassination of Lincoln, Jack London recounts his impressions of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake and H.H. Munro (pen name Saki) writes of the habits of the bird population on the Western Front in WWI. The majority of the articles are written by relative unknowns, whose only claim to fame is recording the events in which they were involved, even if only as sightseers.
Since I skimmed so much of the material, I'm not counting this rather lengthy book towards my page totals; it would probably be more enjoyable to dip in and out of at leisure instead of trying to read the whole book at once.
Recommended to those looking for an overview of history, both the large events and day to day occurrences. -
This is a huge book meant to be read one bite at a time. It's great because it takes you to all kinds of times and places in history, wherever there was someone writing things down at a big, or not so big, moment. The citations make it easy for you to find and read the larger books they came from. This is one of those great reads that will lead you to all kinds of other great reads.
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A fascinating collection of brief journalistic accounts of all different kinds of things from the Middle Ages to the late 20th century. Most of them are just one or two pages. The authors are either journalists or soldiers or statesmen or just private citizens. Many of them are about military battles, some about religious subject matter, some cultural events or famous political happenings, and some are just unique happenings somewhere in the world. Some are funny, many are heartbreaking, especially those in the 20th century about concentration camps.
I was surprised how many were by or about subjects of England, but that says something about the prominence of that country in world history.
Like salted peanuts, once you start reading a few, it's hard to stop. -
Lots of fascinating material, although obviously it's patchy, and there are an awful lot of battle reports. Most disappointing is the 20th century section, which is overwhelmingly given over to wars: WW1, WW2, Korea, Vietnam. WW2 alone gets 100 pages.
But among all the combat and atrocities there are some touching, funny and eye-opening pieces. -
This is just what the title says. Eyewitness accounts of various historical events. Mostly events of various levels of human depravity toward one another from wars, to massacres, to torture. The vignettes are at most five pages long. This made it a good book to dip into every once in a while rather than to try to read in long sittings. The subject matter also made this a sound strategy to use.
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Excellent book to dip in and out (although i read it through) and get a feel for witness accounts of fascinating events throughout recorded history.
Often we just get the victor's account of an event in our history books, so it was so refreshing to be able to read an everyday person's instead.
It's quite a hefty book and well, not literally everything interested me (descriptions of battles, no matter who's doing the describing, tend to bore me to tears, so i skipped those), but it was still an otherwise quite engrossing volume.
And although each piece was no more than a few pages, sometimes a little less than one, it was like reading a compendium of world history. I wanted to get on to the next account to find out what else people had witnessed.
All in all, i'd recommend it to any history buffs who enjoy the occasional 'light' history book, one that you can put down and come back to again and again and learn something new and fascinating from. -
Best history book I think I've ever read--with eyewitness accounts from the people on both sides of the equation who lived through events that include the executions of Czar Nicholas and his entire family, the execution of Mata Hari, World Wars 1 and 2 and so much more--you get a 360 degree view of history. So often only the history as written by the victors is preserved and we lose the feelings and ideals and motivations of the losing side. I think kids in High School should be encouraged to read this book........
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some great stuff in here, going back as far as eyewitness reports of the blowing of Vesuvius and working it's way through to our time, along the way giving rare insights into great moments in history through the quills, archetypewriters and eyes of those who were there.
Ever wondered what it was like to have a few lagers with Attila the Hun? Well, the answer's inside...
On the downside I would have liked more reportage from the 20th Century - there's surprising little! -
Fantastic book, can't recommend it highly enough. I read this right after a summery of European history, the combination of the historical view and the eyewitness accounts is something else.
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Great eyewitness to historical events.
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“Eyewitness To History” edited by John Carey
Avon Books, New York © 1987 by John Carey
Paperback 706 pages, and includes a well written Introduction, Sources, Acknowledgements and Index of Names.
4.50 Bookmarkers
For those that like history, ancient or modern, this book has something for everyone. Except for one entry “The Green Children,” the rest of the writings are a compilation of first hand accounts on different subjects from different time periods.
Correspondents, sent to cover the event wrote some pieces, while others, like the survivors that were aboard the Titanic, were unintended eyewitnesses.
The slivers of lives start with the 430 B.C./B.C.E. “Plague in Athens” by Thucydides, an Athenian historian and general. This edition of “Eyewitness to History” takes the reader up to the year 1986 with “The Fall of President Marcos, Manila, Philippines, 24-25 February 1986” by James Fenton.
History is often violent, messy; and many of these pieces reflect this. But, if you enjoy reading about the times in which these accounts were written you will not be disappointed.
A Time Magazine writer reported on one atrocity, the My Lai Massacre, that took place during the Vietnam War. The raw writing makes one feel that they are there witnessing the sights, screams, military commands, and chaos of war.
Another example of man’s inhumanity is exhibited in “American Slavery: Punishment of a Female Slave, New Orleans, c. 1846” by Samuel Gridley Howe, an educator.
“Every stroke brought away a strip of skin, which clung to the lash, or fell quivering on the pavement, while the blood followed after it.” … “(G)ash after gash was cut in her living flesh, until it became a livid and bloody mass of raw and quivering muscle.”
We read of the humanity and loyalty of an animal. The little dog hid among the folds of its master, Mary, Queen of Scotts, gowns as her severed head lay next to her body.
Though some very short articles comprise only a page or so, their length does not diminish their importance or impact. And, not all the commentaries are a testament to war and calamity.
The birth of a princess, the death of kings and queens and further incidents that shaped our world can be found between the cover of this book.
Additional interesting reads are: “Flaubert and the Dancing Girls: Esna, Egypt, 6 March 1850” by Gustav Flaubert, French novelist and author of “Madame Bovary,” or maybe a you prefer a chance “Dinner with Attila the Hun, c. AD 450”, or a description of “A Viking Funeral,” or a report on “The Irish Potato Famine.”
History is ultimately about people, those individuals that survived to tell the tale, these lives are skillfully documented in this, one of my most treasured books. -
Started off dipping into this book and just reading the accounts that appealed to me. Liked it so much I then went back and read it right through. Often extremely harrowing, the eyewitness accounts have an urgency which history books usually lack. Dominated by war, especially the 20th century, but also interspersed with insights into civilian life. They triggered my interest in researching further into several of the events described. These are a few of my many favourites:
A Viking Funeral, AD 922 - as described by an envoy from the caliph of Baghdad.
The Black Hole of Calcutta, 1756 - as described by one of the few survivors.
The Death of Lord Nelson, 1805 - "Kiss me, Hardy." etc.
The Charge of the Light Brigade, 1854 - "an excess of valour".
Tsar Nicholas II and the Russian Imperial family shot 1918 - not sure why they had to shoot the doctor, the maid and 2 waiters also?
German Airborne Invasion of Crete, 1941 - from the perspective of one of the German paratroopers. -
This is a somewhat random collection of eyewitness accounts of famous events in history. Slight emphasis was placed on accounts of wars and other important events in English history. Most are interesting to read, but there are a few accounts of the Holocaust that were worth the price of admission. I've read a number of Holocaust accounts, but there were a couple in this book that really affected me that I've never read, I think one came from a contemporaneous trial - a German prison guard's account of mass murder of Jews, including young children. We also got a newspaperman's account of the hanging of the top German brass responsible for WWII. There are some really interesting stories that you probably haven't read elsewhere, and that makes this definitely worth picking up.
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This is just what it says: close to 700 pages of 1-3 page eyewitness accounts of moments in history, both important and revealingly everyday, stretching from Thucydides' firsthand account of plague in Athens in 430 B.C. to details of Philippine President Marcos' fall by a journalist present at the trauma in 1986. Warning, however: lots of real horror in eyewitness accounts of various battles, massacres, and terrorism, and Flaubert's hard R rated account of his sexual adventures will really challenge sensitive readers. These accounts give the reader authentic experience of these times in history. The hours this tome takes are time well spent.
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The book has fantastic breadth of first hand account and Reportage. I am a big fan of John Carey. Starts from 430 BC to 1970s. Firsthand account of Visuvius , viking funeral, murder of Archbishop Becket, black hole of Calcutta to Wordsworth walk across field of daffodils . The book clearly shows that our history is bloody and there are few good sides, the Mughals, the Spaniards , colonists, natives, Germans, Americans all can be extremely brutal. If you want to loose your hope on humanity, this is the perfect book. Human 'civilization', an interesting hope.
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Wonderful details make this more than your typical history lesson or documentary. And the mostly well-known authors of these vignettes added even more flavor to the stories, and Carey's massaging makes every reflection and memory an easy, yet compelling read. Wasn't originally interested in reading all of the 300+ accounts, some of events that held little of my interest, but as they were all very short, it was easy enough to wade through, and a worthwhile wade it was.
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"Civilization's most momentous events come vibrantly alive in this magnificent collection of over three hundred eyewitness accounts spanning twenty-four turbulent centuries -- remarkable recollections of battles, atrocities, disasters, coronations, assassinations and discoveries that shaped the course of history, all related in vivid detail by observers on the scene."
~~back cover
This book just wasn't my cup of tea. I like history but apparently not in this format.
