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truepenny
The English Civil War: A People's History by Diane PurkissMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
As an introduction to the English Civil War, this book is unfortunately confusing. She starts out chronological, but does not stay that way, and for the last third of the book, until the last chapter, I really wasn't sure where Charles I was or what he was doing, and I don't feel like I came away with a clear understanding of any of the sets of negotiations that went on (and failed), whether between Charles and the Scots or between the New Model Army and Parliament.
What this book DOES do extremely well is give vivid portraits of the people involved, from Charles himself (and his controversy-magnet queen) to the citizens of London and the soldiers in Parliament's army. She does a great job of showing, through primary materials, what people on both sides (or, I suppose, all three sides) thought and why they thought it. (I loved her lengthy detour into the life of John Milton; she captured both why I hate him and why he is nevertheless rightly considered a major English poet.) And she talks a lot about women: queens and prophets and chatelaines left holding the bag when their husbands rode off to war.
She also does a good job of conveying how horrible the English Civil War was, the way that both armies spent more time pillaging than fighting, the way that, as the war went on and the propaganda on all sides got worse and worse, men's ideas of what it was okay to do to the enemy got more violent and dehumanizing.
So for a grasp of chronology and how events fit together, this is not a good book. But for a sense of the people involved and the human cost of war, it is an excellent book.
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