The Iron Kingdom
Iron Kingdom by Christopher Clark
Hardcover: 800 pages
Publisher: Belknap Press (29-Sep-06)
ISBN-10: 0674023854
ISBN-13: 978-0674023857
Amazon.com Sales Rank: #24,062 in Books
Source: UCBerkeley Library Loan
About this book, the Daily Telegraph wrote:
‘The story of Prussia is one that has been told many times, but seldom as intelligently, elegantly and interestingly as it is here. Christopher Clark has written a monumental history of a state that started from small beginnings as the Mark of Brandenburg, grew in size, violence and pretensions, and ended up being destroyed forever in 1947, when the victorious Allies decided they had had enough of this troublesome phenomenon … The bulk of a fascinating text, littered with intriguing detail and wry observation, focuses on this transformation in the 200 years from the bloody Thirty Years War in the 17th century (which cost Prussia half its population) to the creation by the Prussian nobleman Otto von Bismarck of a German Empire in 1871…Clark has written a masterly synthesis of [the] many disparate strands in a long and ultimately forlorn history.‘
—Richard Overy
It’s a great book, right up my alley — the arcana of German history. Sometimes it gets bogged down a bit in too much arcana of Prussian electoral bureaucracy, but it is a classic and enjoyable read, nonetheless. ★
• 209 Words written by Steve @ 14:18 | 29-Dec-07 in Reading •