Medieval Life (Eyewitness Books)

Rating:
Summary: Limited info, but great pictures
Review: DK eyewitness books are some of the greatest non-fiction books around. The distinctive white background and high-quality photography gives this book an edge over any other nonfiction picture book. And -- these pictures are real! They're beautiful museum-quality photos of all things related to medival times, accompanied by informative captions and text.

Learn about medieval life, from peasants to rich folks, their clothes, food, music, etc. The strength in this book lies in the photos, however, and this book isn't an exhaustive history of medieval times. Rather, it serves as a hook to interest people, and induce them to dig further, while giving them a bit more knowledge.

If you know someone (young or old) who is fascinated by medieval times, then you must introduce them to this book!

Rating:
Summary: A visual introduction to life in Medieval times
Review: I have enjoyed several of the Eyewitness Books, ("Like a mini-museum between the covers of a book" according to "The Los Angels Times Book Review"), and picked up this one because I was reading Michael Crichton's "Timeline." That particular novel involves time travel back to Medieval times, and while the book involves descriptions of clothing, castles and weaponry, and a few sketches, I was looking for something that would help visualization. So "Medieval Life" was a virtual gold mine in that respect.

Andrew Langley covers medieval Europe from life on a country manor to the crowded streets of a developing town. We see how peasant's dressed, how medieval beds were constructed, their cooking utensils, and how to build a cathedral. Langely pays as much attention to the work of stonemasons as he does to jousting knights and how to guild letters on manuscripts. In short, you get a little bit of everything. There are two dozen sections covering running a manor, holy orders, and medieval music. This certainly helped me visualize the daring and dastardly doings in Crichton's novel. There is something of a resurgence of interest in Medieval times, which unenlightened folks used to refer to as the Dark Ages (darn those Renaissance revisionists), and books like "Medieval Life" amply illustrate why this is the case.

Rating:
Summary: This book wasn't the greatest.
Review: Knights, Castles, Medieval Life: Boring. I love Eyewitness books and I like a lot of the Water Eyewitness books, but Eyewitness books like Knights, Castles and Medieval Life just don't appeal to me. Eyewitness Medieval Life gets 1 star because in about 1 or 2 places in the book it is kind of intresting but other then that this book is very plain and boring.