Civilization in the West, Single Volume Edition (5th Edition)

Rating:
Summary: Excellent survey of western history
Review: Civilization in The West is a superb text. Written by an outstanding group of historians the book is highly readable and contains a wealth of information. The suggestions for additional reading at the end of each chapter are invaluable and list the key texts for any time period. Finally, the colorful illustrations and photographs brilliantly compliment the text. This book is a definite buy for anyone interested in a general guide to western civilization.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent survey of western history
Review: Civilization in The West is a superb text. Written by an outstanding group of historians the book is highly readable and contains a wealth of information. The suggestions for additional reading at the end of each chapter are invaluable and list the key texts for any time period. Finally, the colorful illustrations and photographs brilliantly compliment the text. This book is a definite buy for anyone interested in a general guide to western civilization.

Rating:
Summary: Definitely a college text!
Review: I enjoyed this text during my history class very much because it was so in depth. The hundreds of famous paintings alone make this book worthwhile, but it reads very much like a college text. Don't get me wrong -- I came to love history through taking this class, and the book was a large part of that. You must have a high level of literacy and some previous knowledge of history to read this book very easily. NO DETAILS ARE LEFT OUT!!! The book is fabulous and I would recommend it to any level anyways.

Rating:
Summary: Good textbook, not nearly as bad as some i have had to read
Review: The book had lots of info and was easy to understand. It covered all of the most important aspects of western civilizations. Anyone who complains that it was hard to read is an ... I would consider myself smart but i am by no means a rocket scientist and i found this book easy to read and enjoyable. It provided lots of information about certain interesting aspects of different civilizations cultures that would appeal to anyone who whould sign up for a history course.

Rating:
Summary: Civilization in the West, by Kishlansky, Geary, O'Brien
Review: This book is a cornucopia of detail. It is undeniably the most detailed of any textbook on the subject. Unfortunately, this otherwise useful textbook suffers from poor if not outright negligent editing. Some paragraphs are virtually incomprensible. The text reads as if the individual authors took turns writing sentences. The concept of topic sentences and paragraphs expressing discrete subjects seems to have been lost on the authors as well as the editors.

Rating:
Summary: This text book is very dull.
Review: This book is used as a MEH textbook for sophomores in my highschool. My friends and i found this book to be very dull and boring. It contains a lot of information but the way it is presented is not in an interesting manner, rather in a dull way. This book has no bold words which makes it difficult for us to read. I believe it was chapter 17 or 18 that the beginning was very interesting but suddenly it became boring. I think history is interesting but the way that this book teaches it to you is very uninteresting. I don't suggest this book for any highschool student. Everyday when we get our history assignment i dread to read this book because it is so boring.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent!
Review: This book was used as a textbook at my college. Although it contains tons of information, most of which I assume represent a complete account of history from the dawn of man through the 1500's; I did find it unpleasant to read. Although the creative writing style would be great in a Shakespeare manuscript, it is inappropriate in a history textbook. I found myself spending more time attempting to decipher the meaning of the symbolisms and poetic sentence structure used throughout the text, and then I did learning about history. If some Emperor died in a battle, the book doesn't just say, "The emperor died in battle", but rather there seems to be some necessity to provide the reader with an embellished and indirect phrase, which is supposed to mean the same thing. As an example, try to interpret the meaning of the phrase, "Caesar rounded the corners of his conquered provinces". What does that mean? In defense however, the book does provide a generouse amount of pictures, which can be used to help decipher the symbolisms. In addition, the book jumps around a bit. One chapter talks about Julius Caesar, and the last paragraph of the page describes Caesar's death and what a great man he was. To me, that was a perfect closing to life of Caesar. In my mind, he was dead and the discussion was close. I however, was much surprised when I turned the page and suddenly saw him resurrected (I didn't think resurrections were suppose to happen until chapter 5 with Christ). The book went into another 4 pages of Caesar.