Rating: 
Summary: Outstanding Text
Review: A History of Modern Europe is a comprehensive ouverview of European History. It takes the reader through history in a likeable pattern where it switches from country to country and maintains a chronological path. If one is looking for a history of an individual country, one needs to flip from one section to another. I enjoy history, and suprisingly enjoy history textbooks. This book is great factually, and leaves the reader with a sense of the little stories of history.
Rating: 
Summary: A Solid History Textbook
Review: A History of Modern Europe is a comprehensive ouverview of European History. It takes the reader through history in a likeable pattern where it switches from country to country and maintains a chronological path. If one is looking for a history of an individual country, one needs to flip from one section to another. I enjoy history, and suprisingly enjoy history textbooks. This book is great factually, and leaves the reader with a sense of the little stories of history.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding Text
Review: Don't pay any atention to the bored high school brats and their negative "reviews." Anything more complicated than the menu at McDonald's would put them to sleep. This is a lucid, engaging text that transcends the bounds of conventional historiography to borrow from literature and art to adorn a lively narrative. Merriman is a professor of history at Yale who can explain complex developments (such as the French Revolution and the rise of revolutionary nationalism) in accessible terms. It is by far the best introductory textbook on Europe sicne 1300.
Rating:
Summary: If David Calleo Requires It . . .
Review: I am a graduate student at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, DC and I am trying to add the European concentration, and the one book they recommend studying from to pass the comprehensive exams, is this book. The department head is David Calleo, who writes extensively on European subjects, and if David Calleo requires it, then the book must be worth the small fortune charged for it.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent condensation of 500 years
Review: I bought this book for my second semester freshman year as a required textbook. My professor used it as a background to the primary sources we were reading, and it does indeed give excellent background reading into the period. However, I discovered that it comes in handy more than that. Now a junior studying abroad, I dragged this rather heavy volume along with me to Europe, and use it as a basis for further research into the field. Although it isn't going to get indepth like some books can do with a specific focus (one example: it's not going to tell you the population density and makeup of 18th century Bologne) it does give a broad scope of history, and is therefore a perfect place from which to jump into deeper topics.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent condensation of 500 years
Review: I bought this book for my second semester freshman year as a required textbook. My professor used it as a background to the primary sources we were reading, and it does indeed give excellent background reading into the period. However, I discovered that it comes in handy more than that. Now a junior studying abroad, I dragged this rather heavy volume along with me to Europe, and use it as a basis for further research into the field. Although it isn't going to get indepth like some books can do with a specific focus (one example: it's not going to tell you the population density and makeup of 18th century Bologne) it does give a broad scope of history, and is therefore a perfect place from which to jump into deeper topics.
Rating: 
Summary: Put me to sleep every time.
Review: I read this book as part of a high school AP class and I do not think that it was worth my time. The content was very boring and had too much detail that nobody really cares about. The author draws senseless things on for pages and pages that shouldn't even be in the book. I have looked for other sources to help me to even understand what this book is saying, and every other European history book that I have found is many times better than this.
Rating:
Summary: Put me to sleep every time.
Review: I read this book as part of a high school AP class and I do not think that it was worth my time. The content was very boring and had too much detail that nobody really cares about. The author draws senseless things on for pages and pages that shouldn't even be in the book. I have looked for other sources to help me to even understand what this book is saying, and every other European history book that I have found is many times better than this.
Rating: 
Summary: An excellent source.
Review: I used this book recently for a High School AP European History course. It was extremely easy to read and flowed easily from one topic to another. It was very helpful in determining the broad socioeconomic and political elements accross the whole of Europe at specific points in history. (It breaks each country's history into little bricks of information that are clear, concise sections.)
Although the book was determined to be too expensive and detailed for the course (because it is High School AP for a college level European History survey course), I continue to depend on it when studying world history in college. It is definately worth the money if only to keep around for those rainy days when you need some general background knowledge of Germany or Sweden during the 1450s.
Rating:
Summary: Redressing a balance
Review: Modern historiography has a tendency to be highly abstract. Events themselves take a back seat to trends; themes replace actual motivations of living, breathing people. It is seen as more scientific (whether reasonably or not) to view movements of peoples and states in statistical terms. The oldest form of history -- the narrative -- has fallen into some amount of discredit. There are some of us who deplore this development, since we see in the story itself -- the whole snarled skein of the events, the characters, the people -- a kind of richness and complexity that cannot ever be present in any pure distillation of that story along abstract lines. Accordingly I welcome Prof. Merriman's new modern European history. It is suitably analytical where it needs to be, but unlike some other classic standards (Palmer and Colton, for example, comes to mind), it tends not to depart from the story of the events or to fragment that story excessively. For long stretches he is content to let that story tell itself. This puts it in a rare cluster of modern historical textbooks that presents at least the ingredient of narrative while still being written with a mature and discerning reader in mind.
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