The Year 1000 Essay

There have been many books to represent the life of people other than our own for years. One would have thought that this style of nonfiction historical writing would have been mastered by now, but apparently to some scholars this ability is apparently lost. In the “book” The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium - An Englishman 's World by Danny Danziger and Robert Lacey, a ton of information about the history of what is now England is dumped on the reader. This metaphorical wave of information pretty much washes the reader away and leaves them bewildered. The reader is not bewildered by how awesome the book was, but because the book had no real organization to make its purpose work. A good example of how this book

Among its tangents it goes into much detail about the so called great leaders and men of England. This is amid the tangents and these descriptions of events that the year 1000 talks about is nothing to do with the actual layperson of England. Compare this too A day in the life of Rome where the author goes into great detail of not specific people of history but of the imagined roman person. With much care the author creates a great view of what the people were like, and not the leaders. Now this may be due to the lack of the historical resources to craft this image, but if that was the case then how could someone write a book about someone’s life if they did not know anything about it? Honestly it may be that the attempt to include many historical figures into this book was an honest try to give the reader a better view of life back then but it seriously fails in that regard.

Another problem with this book is that the authors did not know who they were writing for. They were probably writing for popular audience, but a popular audience would not have gotten anything from it. It is not entertaining to read simply put. The tangents and sometimes dry reading lead one to get very bored. A day in the life of Rome was actually put into a format that was somewhat entertaining. There was in the slightest form anticipation of what came next. With the year 1000 there was no excitement to getting to another