Reviews for Bath, 1680-1850 A Social History

The average rating for Bath, 1680-1850 A Social History based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-06-12 00:00:00 Rune Dalsgaard Nielsen I picked up this book to get some background about my ancestors from Bath, England. Neale uses the story of Richard Marchant, a bloodsucking capitalist Puritan shyster, to illustrate the rise of the bourgeois entrepreneurs who developed bath as a resort town in the 1700's. Now I wish that the speculative genealogy linking me to Richard were true. To really understand this book, you must start with the full title: "Bath 1680-1850 A Social History or A Valley of Pleasure, Yet a Sink of Iniquity." Neal can't quite decide whether he is writing a history of Bath with its many inherent contradictions, or a scholarly defense of Marxist socialogy. What we get is a mixture of interesting insights into living conditions, class attitudes, real estate development, and political innovation somewhat obscured by jargon ("the social organization of space"), incompetent statistical speculations, and apologies for the failure of dialectical materialism.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-06-05 00:00:00 Jaime Ryan Heintz A very interesting collection of first hand accounts by those involved with the Special Operations Executive or the OSS special operations during WW2. The book is split into chapters covering broad themes or areas of operation. Almost all of the book is in the direct quotation from the various special operations personnel. This shows the attitudes they had to the work and the people that they dealt with. A number of the accounts talked about vetting people, both before operations in the UK and in the field overseas. What struck me was that the methods used in the field are similar to those used by terrorist organisations. I'd always sort of knew it, but this made it a little more real. The other revelation for me was the lack of vindictiveness against the Gestapo in Europe. A couple of the agents talked about incidents where they could have killed or seriously wounded Gestapo officers, yet they didn't. Reading between the lines the implication is that doing so would have had a huge negative impact on the local populace. It may also have contributed to a surprising number of SOE agents surving over a year in captivity. The book covers setting up SOE & OSS (a chapter each). Preparing agents to be deployed, operations in France, the Balkans, Norway, the Far East and also the post war wrap up in Germany.