Random Thinking

The Thirty Years War
by Peter H. Wilson

There are a few problems with this book but the main one is that it is simply too long. 800 pages on the Thirty Years War is just too much unless you have an extreme interest in the topic. I was interested in learning about the war because it is one of those topics that are skimmed over in European history classes and there really isn’t that much out there to read. Plus the start of the book makes it seem like it will be fun reading as he discusses how the war was started because of some Bohemian Protestants tossing the Emperor’s representatives out a window. But the book quickly drags with incredible unnecessary detail that for most people will be out of their head three pages later anyway. Yes, I did learn a lot about the war but with so much detail I didn’t enjoy learning it and a lot of what the book covered I have no memory of whatsoever.

Let’s compare this book to Desmond Seward’s book on the Hundred Years War. Seward covers his topic in sufficient detail in only 300 pages. That book moves quickly and is fun and interesting. But it takes Wilson eight chapters (almost 250 pages) to even get to the beginning of the Thirty Years War. And Wilson throws so many people and places at us without enough maps or family trees that trying to remember who’s who and where’s where makes the book even more frustrating. We get emperors, kings, dukes, princes, knights, bishops, generals, electors from German states, Poland, Denmark, Sweden, Russia, Italy, Holland with cities, towns, provinces, principalities, protectorates and trying to keep track of who is in charge of what place and where that place is in relation to the next place is impossible or at least it was for me. The book has only two maps other than battle maps. One is a map of central Europe that lacks sufficient detail and the other is a map of Switzerland(!) that is mostly useless. The battle maps themselves look like something Wilson might have drawn on the back of a cocktail napkin. This is the 21st century so getting a clear and detailed map should not be a great difficulty. Try to imagine someone writing a book on World War II without including several maps showing the pitch and flow of the war across Europe during the 6 years of fighting. And as far as pictures go, the pictures on Wikipedia’s article on the war are better than anything you will find in this book.

But the main problem is that the book is way too long because Wilson feels a need to tell us everything about the war (and the 50 or so years before the war started) that his research dug up. Plus Wilson is a lousy writer. If Wilson had limited himself to even 500 pages and aimed his book at a reader other than the historian in the next office this book could have been worth reading. It’s too bad that Wilson didn’t use his first chapter as a model for writing the book.