History of Switzerland the First 100,000 Years Before the Beginnings to the Days of the Present Book

Yay for using textbooks to stack my GR challenge stats!

Anyhow, I feel mildly dishonest rating this because I didn't actually read everything. It's pretty dry, and I didn't have time for some of the middle chapters. I would say that I'll go back and read them, but... I won't. I'll take it to class for discussion tomorrow, then move my bookmark to our next book and leave it on the shelf until it's time to sell it.

But as far as the actual content goes, what I read of it at least - it's not terrible. For a book which is barely 300 pages, including diagrams and photos, and covering almost three thousand years of history in a fairly large and active area, it's pretty good, really. The problem is that the size and broadness of it meant that nothing really was explained thoroughly. A lot of paragraphs were long lists of who conquered what and when they did it. I kind of skimmed those. The interesting things, for me, were the tidbits of sociological information hidden away in between lists of battles. History that's just a list of 'and then x happened and then y' is not appealing to me; I like the human element, the information (or even just speculation) about how people lived. I understand that such information isn't always available in the study of the Near East, but to be honest I don't see the point of lists of battles and surely there's enough sociological information for a tad bit more elaboration.

In the end, well... it isn't leisure reading, but there are worse textbooks.