The Nature of Things

Magna Carta: The Birth of Liberty by Dan Jones My rating: 3 of 5 stars I have previously enjoyed reading Dan Jones' books, The Plantagenets and The Wars of the Roses , and I find the history of 13th and 14th century England and Europe in general quite fascinating, so I looked forward to reading Jones' new book, Magna Carta: The Birth of Liberty . But even though the subject interests me and Jones is a very good writer of histories meant for the general population, for some reason, I just couldn't get connected to the flow of the narrative. Maybe it had more to do with my distractions than with the quality of the writing. As most people probably do, I had some general knowledge of the Magna Carta as a founding document of western democracies but I wasn't especially knowledgable about the intricacies of how it came about and the background that led up to it. Nor was I really aware that the original didn't last more than a matter of months and that it was reissued ag...

The Wars of the Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudors by Dan Jones My rating: 4 of 5 stars I had read Dan Jones' book The Plantagenets last year and enjoyed it tremendously. In fact, I thought it was one of the best books that I read all year. So I was anxious to read his latest, which was a follow-up to that and continued the story of the Plantagenets through The Wars of the Roses when the two branches of the family tore themselves apart in the struggle to be the family in power. They were, of course, the Yorks and the Lancasters, and this book recounts how their long reign in England came to an end and they gave way to an upstart family that combined the blood of the two Plantagenet branches, the Tudors. It turns out the Tudors are the ones who gave that century-long struggle for the crown of England its popular name by which we know it today. The Tudors were masters of PR, and they fully recognized the advantage of claiming the blended blood of both o...

The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England by Dan Jones My rating: 5 of 5 stars "The prince was drunk." It's one of those memorable first sentences that draws you right in and makes you want to know more. Who is this prince and why was he drunk? Why was his being drunk important? What were the consequences of that drunkenness? It is from such minor, sometimes seemingly insignificant threads that the entire fabric of history is woven, and Dan Jones has an eye for those threads. He teases them out and shows them to us with style and wit and in great detail throughout this popular history of one of the foundational dynasties of England. From that drunken prince, William the Aetheling, who, along with his drunken crew, was about to die in an 1120 shipwreck, to the beginning of the reign of Henry IV in 1399 - which marked the end of the Plantagenets and the beginning of the Lancasters' dynasty - Jones keeps his reader engaged in the events of this med...