France: An Adventure History

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Masters of the sea, the Venetians raised an empire through an ethos of service and loyalty to a republic that lasted a thousand years. Robb moves forward to a sheepherder prodigy from Aurillac named Gerbert, who later became Pope in 999 after spending many years in Reims. Maybe it’s just easier for me to connect to the Charlie Hebdo massacre than the Hundred Years War or Louis XIV in Flanders. There is a lot I learned from these pages that I hadn't ever encountered before, and having read about it through Robb's journeys seemed to make it more relevant. Overall, the concept is interesting, and while some chapters were weaker than others, this was an interesting read and a fairly unique take on popular history writing.

Please, dear stranger, do not confuse this with what Robb does from beginning to end, which was to follow French history from Vercingetorix's Gaul all the way to Macron's France (the latter is meant without offence). From pre Roman Gaul to the present day challenges, tensions and inconsistencies of French society, the journey takes you through the lesser known and often amusing aspects of French history.This book is not merely an episodic puff piece about the pretty objects and culture richness that were created on French soil. Everything about Venice,' observed Lord Byron, 'is, or was, extraordinary - her aspect is like a dream, and her history is like a romance.

He took the name Sylvester II and was scholarly and used ancient Roman and Arabic manuscripts to experiment with. Robb is British but he has traveled extensively in France, much of it on a bicycle, and his starting points are always personal and based on what he has seen with his own eyes. Graham Robb and his wife cycle all over modern France, finding traces of past history, adventures had by people who may now be more myth than reality to us. The land will always predominate: it shrugs at the presence of such pretenders as language (although language is doing a pretty good job of warming the seas these days).I also found fascinating Robb’s description of how the Tour de France came to be such a huge event in France, one reason being that in its route across the country, it gave small towns and villages a sense of identity and pride that they were being noticed, however briefly. While at times well written, the book bounced around from Julius Caesar to modern times and covering only select regions, episodes, and characters, somewhat connected to France. While each chapter is a self-contained story, within those chapters the narrative moves between Robb and his wife Margaret’s adventures and those that took place hundreds of years earlier.

This is a fairly ambitious book, covering a huge amount of time in an attempt to give an impression of the whole history of France as a nation. Stories from the Sea : Legends, adventures and tragedies of Ireland's coast, by Jo Kerrigan ( hardback) Rp 370. He connects the land to its history in a way that made me want to fly to France and see if I could follow his trail. If you are looking for a general overview of the history of the country, you would be better served by more traditional works.She has been largely forgotten, but Robb’s description of her relationship with Louis Napoleon makes her come alive, and Robb contends that without her Napoleon would have become a complete unknown. He helped her with her French, and they played are usually dismissed, but Robb notes that she was honest and had no career nor political reputation to defend, as did many biographers of Napoleon. It is fun and filled with interesting information and may even make you smile or be inspired to take a bike ride.

A stunningly illustrated history of Venice, from its beginnings as 'La Serenissima' - 'the Most Serene Republic' - to the Italian city that continues to enchant visitors today. Though possibly the biggest highlight was the chapter on Napoleon and particular his exile on St Helena in the South Atlantic where he met and befriended the young child, Betsy Balcombe. Nonetheless it represented the accidental discovery of a significant past buried by the successive tidal waves of human history, the very subject of Robb’s book.I enjoyed the chapters on both World Wars as well as the rather sad story of the Narcisse Pelletier (White Savage) and his experience of being stranded with a native tribe of Australian Aborigines. Robb’s journey is not that of Indiana Jones in the The Last Crusade, but I found it equally as interesting in a wholly different way.