This was a pretty good book. It gave me a lot of things to do. I liked it a lot.

Reviewed by Johanna Granville, Clemson University, Clemson, SC USA

This book has several strengths. Calhoun examines Soviet decision making toward the Hungarian crisis. This detailed book is written in an entertaining style. The book consists of two case studies; half of the book is devoted to the British role in the Suez crisis. However, although this book was relatively recently published, it does not contain any recent archival findings. The author apparently knows neither Russian nor Magyar.

This is one of the Men-at-Arms grabbag volumes. While there are wonderful illustrations and lots of facts crammed in here, one has to wonder just how accurate a book covering warfare in approximately 1/2 of Europe over a 570 year period can be. In the end, use this book as a jumping off point, but not the last word on Eastern Europe.

The Angus McBride illustrations are mostly up to their standards of excellence, although he has left the last painting only partially done for some obscure reason and he DOES like to focus on atypical arms and armour, which can be interesting, but also presents a rather skewwed vision of the armies of the period.

Nicolle tries valiantly with this volume. As I said above, there are a LOT of facts in here. There are two problems that press on the information. 1) Militarily, this is a poorly chronicled era and the sheer number of languages makes the task all the more duanting and 2) the timeframe is just far too broad for any serious considerations. Imagine lumping all of, say, American military developement from 1492 to the present (a similar timeframe) into a volume this size and you will get a notion of the enormity of the task.

The informaion is as good as the team can get it. The illustrations do their best to bring a candle to the minds of Western Europe and America as to what Eastern Europe went through. The writing is solid. In the end, though, the book has severe limitations. Take it with a grain of salt.

Hello. I`m looking for a picture of him, from Hungary. Please write me something to search it.

In preparing for a trip to Hungary, I examined thoroughly the choices for Budapest.

My favorite guidebook series has been Lonely Planet, and the Budapest Lonely Planet is fairly helpful. Although it doesn't give as thorough a treatment on accomodations, the book gives a lot of travel hints and secret. I found its facts for the visitors to be the most helpful, and the maps (placed at the very back of the book) to be the easiest to use. The frommer book, on the other hand, put the maps close to the section of the book referring to it. The organization of LP makes it easiest to use in the field; they tend to have the best background, history and cultural information. LP was particularly good about including rules, regulations and things like closing times. ON the other hand, there are not many photos, and they don't plan as many walking tours as the frommer book does. I didn't find the written descriptions that engaging, although the cultural background seemed well done.

The Frommer's Budapest book (3rd edition) gave the best information about finding and choosing accomodations, but the book has no pictures and aside from a nice subway cover on the inside cover, the maps are hard to find and not very easy to use. Frommer's gives excellent information about prices and shops and restaurants; it's almost a guide to buying things rather than a tour book. I didn't find it particularly thorough about travel information, customs, or those sorts of details. That is not entirely fair. They have a nice section in the front a kind of "best of" list for things in budapest. The nice thing about the book is that it recommends things to do if you have only one day, three days or a week. They also suggested some itineraries for walking tours.

The Fodor's Budapest pocket reference is drab and not full of much information. Don't get it.

The Eyewitness Travel Guide on Budapest by Tadeusz Olszanski is the most eye-catching and the least helpful. It contains lots of graphics and diagrams and maps, and not too much information. The multitude of pictures are helpful in describing architecture, geography and art. On the other hand, its information on accomodations is very limited. Don't get me wrong; it's a beautiful and interesting book; it just is not as helpful as the other three. And it is two years old. I'm not necessarily saying that this book is bad, merely that it may not help you very much on the excursion.

The Budapest: A Critical Guide by Andras Torok, 4th edition is a less complete and more personal account of things to do in Budapest. The other books were like encyclopedias, but this book was just a few personal recommendations about things to do and places to stay. Also, the writing for this book seems to be better than the other books. If you already are a little familiar with Budapest, but just want to learn about new and undiscovered places, this might be an excellent book. It certainly covers most of the bases, but it just doesn't try to list a huge number of accomodations or restaurants.

I ended up buying the Frommer's and a used copy of the Eyewitness travel guide.

A decent book with good information, but be warned: It should have been entitled, "How to Get a Job Teaching English in Eastern Europe." No other areas are explored.

I bought this book while researching Czech and Slovak politics, and got quite a bit less than I was expecting from it. Perhaps the title misled me: I was expecting an overview of politics in the region, but what I got instead was a handbook that, to a large extent, summarised the constitutions of the four countries.

What I found disappointing was the author's sometimes uncritical quotations from constitutions and party programmes. Rather than repeating what is supposed to be, he could have done a better job of informing the reader about what is by bringing in observations and opinions from other political scientists.

In certain areas, Fitzmaurice's urge to summarise leaves the book thin on the ground. For example, the author uses a single paragraph to describe "constitution building" in Slovakia.

The book also shows signs of a poor editing job. The author is quite patchy in his use of diacritics in Central European names; he uses them in some names, while ommitting them in others. He also manages to misspell the names of two leading Slovak politicians. Further, the book is not free of factual errors: Fitzmaurice writes about Poland's Marshal Pilsudski fighting "against the Soviet Union in 1920", when more careful research would have shown him that the USSR was, in fact, not founded until 1922, after Communist Russia's war with Poland was over. Such errors and ommissions reflect badly on the author's knowledge of the region.

Finally, given the title of the book, I expected more attention to be placed on regional issues and on relations between the four countries. While the author does maintain a comparative framework throughout the book, he devotes a handful of pages explicitly to relations between the four countries.

Thus, in short, while the book does provide useful background information on the four countries' politics, the reader would be well advised to look elsewhere for more in-depth information and analysis.

This was a very interesting glimpse into the life of soldiers in WWII, and contains some interesting radio broadcasts from the era.

The quality of the audio is on par with the technology available for the time and the publishers did not run it through any filters, (or if they did some of it was very poor quality to begin with). However, this product does deliver on what it advertises.

Its historical significance is only appreciable, to those who already study the events of WWII; this product is in no way a solid tool to use, other than enhancing existing resources with some interesting audio clips.

If you are looking for some audio clips from the era, and will not mind the (understandable) quality issues of the clips, then this may be a good product for you.

This text is not a good history text. Any good text book will make the subject come alive, this book kills it. It is, however, extremely informative, if you can get through the introduction without dieing. NOT recommended for anyone who is not a post grad! (and even then, only if required for a class).

There is a reason why this book is out-of-print. It's as dry a book as I've ever read and is much more a critique on the Hapsburg Empire and less of a historical overview. The title implies that Kann will introduce the reader to the Central Europeon Power and detail much of the family's power over Europe but that's far from the case. Instead, Kann goes so in depth to pick apart the Hapsburg's, that impossible to keep track of where he's going. Although the chapters have a chronological order to them, Kann mentions events that happened during a five-hundred year span in the first three chapters and aimlessly wanders so much through the text, he should be arrested for reckless writing. Some writers can pull off writing like this and make it into a masterpiece (Son of the Morning Star by Evan S. Connell comes to mind), Kann simply makes it into a field of landmines in which the reader unexpectedly will step onto a trap and utter "Whaaat?" and have to skip back to try and figure out if Kann has a connection to the previous paragrapgh or if he's just writing instantaneous thoughts. Kann's rambling book reminds me of Paul Thomas Anderson movies - it's made purely to pleasure the writer while the rest of the world has its hands in the air wondering "What did I just read/ watch?"

I am a history major at Indiana State University. In my spring term, I used the book (as one of my sources) for my research paper on the Great Siege of Malta of 1565. I will agree that this particular book is not the greatest reading in the world, but generally historians write books for historians. Also, I will agree with other reviewers that the book's title is misleading because it does not focus on the 16th century compared to others. The book was used in my research to help explain the rivilary between Charles V of Spain (the Holy Roman Emperor) and Francis I (King of France). The cause of the rivals were not because of the grudge with Charles V winning the election for the Holy Roman Emperor or Francis I imprisonment in 1525, but Francis saw the danger of the Habsburg Empire surrounding France.

I will recommend this book for people needing information on the Habsburgs for research and to get it at your library or buy an used copy.

Not to be taken as a serious, scholarly work on its own. It reads more like a bad novel occasionally hemorrhaging facts--perversely analogous to one of Bathory's poor victims. Sadly, there is no clear dividing line between facts and breezy, flatulant fiction writing. Unless you are experienced in reading poorly written continental-Eurpoean prose, are some sort of PoMo cretin, or are some teenaged Goth/dork, the value to be culled from reading this book is little worth the effort.

This has got to be the most poorly written book I've ever read. Unnecessarily flowerly prose makes much of the work incomprehensible, and what is understandable is loaded with minute detail about things that add absolutely nothing to the story or our understanding of it's subject. A totally unrelated chapter devoted to the crimes of Giles de Raiis only adds to the confusion. Try instead, the fictional "Blood Countess." It's far more readable and there's probably enough fact in the mix to give readers the overview they won't find here.

a quick interesting read,its too bad there isnt more available about this bizzare subject.