The Story of Spain

I got this book to prepare for a tourist trip to Spain. It gives a very good overview of the history of Spain starting from prehistoric times up to about the mid-1990's. The more modern history is understandably rather cursory. The Spanish Civil War was a bit confusing with the multiple political parties and really requires it's own book to understand. The author gives a small biography on each time period for futher reading. The best feature of this book is that after each chapter the author gives tourist sites related to each historic period. For example after the Roman history chapter, he lists sites with Roman ruins and how it relates to what you just read. This makes the book a good reference to bring along on the trip. It you plan a tourist trip to Spain and only have time for one book, this would be the one to pick up.

I reviewed The Story of Spain, as well as several other books, to see if I would recommend it to my Spanish students. To my surprise I found it well-written and fast-moving. Mark Williams covers a huge stretch of time, but does it in an manner which is both interesting and at times, amusing. He vividly recreates each of the dramatic events and social changes in the history of the peninsula.He also closes each chapter with a list of places in Spain where artifacts, architecture and art, typical and representative of the time period covered in the preceding chapter, can still be found today. This is very useful for anyone travelling to Spain.The modern history of Spain is complex, and we bogged down a few times with the endless list of political activists, but this is minor. I think the greatest testiment is that most of my students (college & high school) enjoyed this book so much, they read ahead.

I found "The Story of Spain" to be a highly readable, informative book about a very complex subject. So I was puzzled by another, quite mean-spirited review attacking the book. Spanish history lite? Well, telling the entire exciting story in under 300 pages must have been a challenge, but Williams was up to the task as all other reviewers agree. The John Crow book, "Spain: The Root and the Flower," is also excellent, if a bit more academic in approach, and would make a good follow up for those wanting another perspective. In fact, Williams himself cites it as a source for further reading. Regarding the use of an identical quotation, that must be common in history books. I doubt if Mr. Crow was there to hear the words direct from the saint! (He too copied it from somewhere.) And in fact Williams acknowledges using Crow and many other traditional sources (the usual boring history) to tell "the story" with breathtaking clarity. The scholarship must be sound as well, if so many professors have endorsed it. Indeed, Williams' book has been highly praised by Dr.Paul Smith, who used it for several years in a course he taught for the Spanish department at U.C.L.A. That's the same place where Mr. Crow once taught, I believe. Yet it's "The Story of Spain" that was selected. To me, that says a lot.

I picked this book up because I'm going to Spain for 10 days and I wanted background. What a page-turner. All those people hovering around the perifery of my historical knowlege are examined and put into perspective in the history of Spain: Cervantes, Goya, Velezquez, the Holy Grail, Sephardic Jews, Muslims, the Alhambra, Catherine of Aragon,the Altamira Cave, the Roman aqueducts, Napoleon and his brother Joseph (King of Spain, ever so briefly),the Basques,Hadrian again, and on and on. A scholarly synthesis of Spain's history wonderfully written immensely readable and hard to put down.

Being an avid student of history, I found the book "The Story of Spain" by Mark Williams a magnificently well written, factual, unbiased, and complete synthesis of Spain's complex history compiled in less than a 300-page volume. Yet, it covers with amazing detail from pre-historical times to our very present. Many are the merits of this outstanding book. For one, instead of presenting a succession of dry historical facts as is often the case, this book is written in such a fluid and exciting manner that the reader gets passionately involved in its lecture as if going through the most intriguing fiction drama hard to set aside. Further, internal events and external influences are precisely narrated to convey their progressive impact in forging the unique, often tragicomic, always dramatic Spanish personalities - the reader clearly understands each new development as a natural result of a prior build up. Furthermore, from beginning to end, all its historical and cultural protagonists are vividly presented as true human beings, with their predominant characteristics but also with their strengths and weaknesses skillfully outlined by well-selected phrases, back-and-forth comparisons, and anecdotes.But its principal merit in my opinion is the extraordinary ability of this author in grabbing the undivided attention of the reader, walking effortlessly through some 15,000 years while impressing a remarkable sense of perspective that other authors require volumes to convey. Humbly conceived by its author for the educational enjoyment of English-speaking tourists, it is pitiful that such a jewel has not been translated into the Spanish language as serious history students in Spain and Latin American could gain much insightful knowledge. Having read lots of books on this topic (Madariaga, Menendez-Pidal, Castro, S. Albornoz... as well as Livermoor, Carr, Bertrand...), I emphatically recommend this brief "story" as superbly narrated, highly perceptive, and very comprehensive.