David
Ross
Took
me quite a while to read this (and a whole lot longer to get around
to starting it ~ i think i’ve owned it for nearly
two years!), but not for any bad reason, just time constraints and
other things grabbing mine attention and refusing to let it go.
There were a couple of points that rather disappointed me about this,
led me to be slightly slower in reading it than i might have
otherwise been: First is the physical book itself ~ it is printed on
coarse, newspaper-style paper, which gives it a bad feeling to me,
both because i’m afraid of permanently damaging it (i have an
almost unhealthy respect for the physical well-being of my books) and
because that paper triggers a reaction in my mind which says that the
contents are less important, more transitory, perhaps, than more
expensively produced works; second, obviously, the content found in
that physical book ~ i have been unable to determine properly the
reader for whom Ross was writing; at times i felt he was producing a
child’s history of Wales, or at least one for juvenile readers, but
at other times i got the feeling that he was hoping for a full adult
readership, and occasionally that he was aiming at the high end of
that range, if not actually academic level. This difficulty, either
in conception or in execution (or, to be fair, in mine understanding
of the book), made for an up and down reading experience; i was not
always sure, as i turned the page or moved into a new section, just
what i was going to be in for.
A
third point, though not so much a disappointment as an observation,
is that the sidebars can be distracting as they automatically attract
the eye and the reader then must focus on staying away from them or
allow himself to read them as soon as the page it turned revealing
them; either action leads to a loss of flow in the main text. This
is not to say that sidebars are always bad ~ they’re not; sometimes they are quite useful ~ nor that
i have a better solution ~ i don’t; i am merely pointing out a
problem with their use.
In
the end, which may come as a surprise considering i seem to have done
nothing but complain in this review, i enjoyed the book, probably
enough to make it a success by my criterion, and though i may not
know a lot more after having read it than i did before, i do know
where to find information, and where to turn for further research
about Welsh history (there are a reasonable, though unannotated,
bibliography and a very good chronology as parts of the end matter).
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