Eyewitness accounts of the Thirty Years War, 1618-48/

This book has a double purpose. The first is practical. Mortimer (St. Edmund Hall, Oxford Univ.) wants to use eyewitness accounts of the Thirty Years War as the basis for describing what life was like for the people who lived where the war took place. This part of the book is quite successful. The writing is crisp and well organized, and quotations are skillfully and nearly seamlessly inserted into the text. There is, however, a somewhat less successful attempt to show that propaganda from both sides made the war seem worse than it actually was, and that tales of cannibalism and massacre are not particularly credible. Maybe so, but even as described, the war comes through as terrible enough with its fair share of death and destruction. Mortimer's second goal is to show that personal observations, "ego-documents," if carefully used, have a place in historical research. While this idea may be controversial in German historiography, in many other countries it is no longer an issue. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Upper-level undergraduates. R. E. Schreiber Indiana University South Bend