Poland: An Illustrated History

The amount of scholarship and sheer number of facts included in this book are quite amazing. The effort put into assembling all this information must have been prodigious. Unfortunately the book does have several drawbacks. First it reads as if it was not edited before publication and in some areas looks like it was written on a home computer. Not only are there quite a few mispellings of easy words (almost certainly just typos that were never caught) but in my copy there are unexplained gaps in the sentences which then inexplicably begin again at the beginning of the next line. Also the illustrations although numerous are not of very high quality from a technical viewpoint. The closeup pictures of individual people are fine but some of the reproduced paintings are totally uninterpretable. In one of a supposed cavalry charge in my copy all you can make out are a few horses and a tower surrounded by smoke because of the poor reproduction (page 150). Also it should be noted that all of the pictures are black and white except for the beautiful picture of the winged horsemen on the front of the cover. The included maps also may have been quite useful in their original format but after being reduced to fit into this rather small page format leave much to be desired. Finally the book reads more like a chronicle or an outline for a history book in that many chapters are merely one sentence listings of various Polish accomplishments strung together page after page. In summary I would give 5 stars for effort and 3 stars for execution for a combined score of 4. People already familiar with Polish history and with Polish historical individuals may get more out of the book than people looking for an illustrated introductory history. A short explanation of the pronunciation of Polish names would have been very helpful to non-Polish readers like myself. Can anyone explain just what the author meant by Positivism which is used in many different locations but if it was explained in the book I must have missed it? Still glad I read this book and I did learn a lot from it but it had the potential to be really great with a few improvements.

This one-of-a-kind atlas covers every major episode of history--from prehistoric times to the present. Must reading!