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Rating: 
Summary: Great photographs, entertaining style, somewhat eclectic.
Review: I am a graduate student of modern history, currently working on 19th century Greece. Professor Clogg's book is a good introduction to the subject. I don't think there are better ones around. His relaxed style of writing and the layout together make for a very attractive and easily-read history of modern Greece. The photographs are fantastic. Almost half the book is made up by pictures and little stories relating to them. This is nice to read, but also a little confusing. There is a lot of information without a context, a lot of loose ends, too few conclusions, and too little coherence. To put it short, Clogg is a good historian, but I don't think he had many late nights editing this so-called "Concise History". (What a ridiculous title, by the way.) Having said that, the academic level is high, the political angle is very moderate and the glorification of the Greek national state is less pronounced than in earlier volumes. There is an underlying if not out-spoken atmosphere of sound critical thinking. I prefer historians who don't pretend to know exactly what happened. If you are really interested in Modern Greece, you should maybe read P. Kitromilides "Enlightenment, Nationalism, Orthodoxy". To me Kitromilides really is the king of modern Greek history. Very up-to-date, very thought-provoking, very new, very eloquent.
Rating: 
Summary: A good book but a little incoherent
Review: I enjoyed reading the book but in some parts I had difficulties to understand the context. Somehow, Clogg jumps from one subject to the other. Also, there were very difficult historical words which are especially difficult for readers whose mother tongue is not English. Admittedly, the book has not been written for foreign readers but I think that even an English native speaker has a problem to understand words like "irredentism" and "shibboleth" if he didn't study history. Another problem is the title of some chapters. He calls one chapter "The legacy of the Civil war 1950 - 1974" although the civil war in Greece was between 1944 and 1949 or so. How can he call this capter in the abovementioned way if he writes about military rule and the Cyprus conflict? He admitted in a way that Britain and the USA have contributed to the beginning of the Cyprus conflict but he doesn't write much about it. I read the book but sometimes I did not understand it, in particular the context. I wished he would have written also more about the Ottoman rule in Greece or even the beginning of the history of Greece. The book would have been thicker, indeed, but it would have given more information. Also, he should have given the book a slightly different title, for instance "A Concise History of Greece - 1770 - 1990". This would have been clearer because as a reader you think that he has written about the whole history of Greece. However, all in all it was a good book. I enjoyed it.
Rating:
Summary: Deftly written and carefully researched
Review: Now in an expanded second edition, A Concise History Of Greece by Richard Clogg (Fellow of St. Anthony's College, Oxford University, England) is a straightforward, scholarly chronicle of the modern history of Greece, ranging from the Ottoman rule of the late 1700's, to the pressures of Balkan strife and political modernization of the present day. Deftly written and carefully researched, supplemented with tables, short biographies, as well as a listing of the royal houses of Greece, A Concise History Of Greece is an excellent and scholarly survey of the modern growth of the nation which is a strongly recommended addition to academic World History collections in general, and Hellenic History supplemental reading lists in particular.
Rating:
Summary: A delightful work on Greek history
Review: Richard Clogg is a renowned international scholar who has been writing about Greek history for decades. This work is a popularization (from footnotes deliver me) that should prove very helpful to the layman with more than a casual interest in Greece. It invites comparison with C.M. Woodhouse's also famous history, but I must declare myself incompetent to decide if one is better than the other.Clogg's section on the Ottoman period is blessedly brief and his discussion of the Nazi occupation and Communist insurection are to-the-point yet incisive. Perhaps the most exciting feature of the work is the great bunch of pictures gracing nearly every page and showing the days of glory in Modern Greece as well as some of the saddest. The maps are also helpful. There are no footnotes but the selective bibliography will be useful to most readers. There is also an appendix giving thumbnail biographies of some luminaries in modern Greek history.
Rating:
Summary: Great reference material
Review: This is a great book for both an introduction as well as an on-going reference source on modern Greece.
Highly recommend it to students or anyone interested in learning the history of the modern state, without getting bogged down with boring details.
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