Rez. Theodore K.

Rabb, New York Times, Norman Davies: "Europe"

Fehler.... And yet one could recommend this as an eccentric but often vigorously written introduction to the European past, enlivened with telling insights, apt quotations and excellent quick overviews of such topics as the Crusades and the Hanseatic League, were it not for a fundamental failing that undermines it as a serious work of history. An early hint of trouble is the appearance of the historian Bronowski, on page 2, as Joseph, not Jacob. A little later we learn that, General Sherman and others notwithstanding, the United States ''has never known the lash of war on its own face.'' And then the mistakes multiply: Hannibal and the Renaissance scholar Lorenzo Valla's exposure of the forgery of the Donation of Constantine are put in the wrong centuries; the Dalmatian St. Jerome becomes a native of the Rhineland; the first mention of Moscow in the historical record is given two different dates, the beginnings of the Dutch Revolt is given three; Copernicus's work is misunderstood; Catherine de' Medici appears as Marie (an entirely different queen); Lutheran Saxony turns Calvinist; there are three errors in two lines about Queen Christina; the Trevi Fountain moves to the Piazza Navona and becomes a work of Bernini; Cromwell is said incorrectly to have decided on Charles I's execution; and in one sentence the political theorists Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes both get the wrong publication date for their most famous works. Without looking anything up, this reviewer spotted inaccuracies, on average, every other page. Things got so bad that eventually I counted seven wrong dates in 11 lines, and soon thereafter (nearly two-thirds of the way through the text) I realized that there was little point either in continuing a close reading or in recommending the book to anyone who might regard it as a source of information.