Though widely held to be the authoritative history of the French Revolution, I found Mr. Schama's recounting of that terrible time painfully long and oppressively weighed down by trivia. Perhaps this is a work more suited for scholars willing to wade through 976 interminable pages of dry but accurate history. Clearly, I will have to return my membership to the society of history buffs because I was skipping whole pages from about page 100 on. Perhaps it is meant to be a reference guide for those teaching a course on a revolution which, in some sense, lasted nearly 20 years as it chewed through multiple constitutions, parliaments, heads of state, currencies and ethics. In that, there is much for Mr. Schama to cover, but doing it with writing as dry as the Gobi? It could not claim my attention.
For anyone looking for a more digestible version of the French Revolution, I suggest Donald S. Sutherland's Liberty and Its Price, a lecture in the Modern Scholar series. However, if you have some suggestions for me, please feel free to write and pass them along. The violence of the French Revolution, especially when contrasted with the comparatively bloodless American Revolution of a scant ten years earlier, has always fascinated me. I found very little enlightenment here. (1/5 Stars)
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