02/09/2015
Mr. Pye draws on a dizzying array of documentary and archaeological scholarship, which he works together in surprising ways. Mr. Pye advances on several fronts at once, following the overlapping currents of customary, religious and empirical ways of thinking. He writes about difficult concepts with vivid details and stories, often jump-cutting from exposition to drama like a film. It’s complicated, but fun.
No more of the tired old attribution of europe’s glories to italian city states or germanic empires; it’s around the shore of the North Sea that Michael Pye sees the slow but decisive emergence of our modern world. Utterly readable.
A closely-researched and fascinating characterization of the richness of life and the underestimated interconnections of the peoples all around the medieval and early modern North Sea. A real page-turner.
Beautifully written and thoughtfully researched. For anyone, like this reviewer, who is tired of medieval history as a chronicle of kings and kingdoms, knights and ladies, monks and heretics, The Edge of the World provides a welcome respite.
A double pleasure, first for its unique, illuminating vision of a time largely unknown and misunderstood by modern readers, but even more for its exemplary prose. Pye’s writing is vigorous and precise, the work of a writer who revels in his subject and who nurses a fondness for its many curious byways and paradoxes.
It is the measure of Pye’s achievement that he can breathe life into the traders of seventh-century Frisia or the beguines of late-medieval Flanders as well as into his more celebrated subjects. Hugely enjoyable. Grey the waters of the North Sea may be; but Pye has successfully dyed them with a multitude of rich colors.
Michael Pye has a great journalist's eye for a story and the telling anecdote as well as a great historian's ability to place it in the bigger picture. Here he fuses those talents in a hugely eclectic study of the very first stirrings of modernity in northern Europe.
For more than a millennium, the North Sea was our trading floor and our internet. Yet this connection, this period, and this sea remain wrapped in fog. With elegant writing and extraordinary scholarship, Pye does a rare but important thing by focusing not on lands but on the waters that unite them.
A lively account. Pye’s vivid prose proves that this time was anything but dark.
Extraordinary. Astonishing. The end result is brilliantly illuminating. Pye’s creativity brings light to this once dark time.
The Times Saturday Review
A masterly storyteller.
Splendid. A heady mix of social, economic, and intellectual history, written in an engaging style. It offers a counterpoint to the many studies of the Mediterranean, arguing for the importance of the North Sea. Exciting, fun, and informative.
A pleasure. I learned a great deal and enjoyed it enormously.
Persuasive and eloquent. A radical perspective on the modern world. No book I have read has looked at the available evidence in the way it is presented here. A multilayered, complicated, dense book that demands time to be read and be digested but rewards by giving one plenty to chew on.
Excellent. The Edge of the World does what good non-fiction should, in making the reader see the world in a different light.
From a new perspective on the Vikings to an examination of information as a form of currency, Pye’s book offers an engaging and enlightening look at a little understood time and place.
The amazing story of how the North Sea made us who we are. A dazzling historical adventure.
This is the kind of book that can open up new vistas. An inspiring book, full of surprises.
A compelling account of societies around the North Sea will make you see the world in a different light.
Bristling, wide-ranging and big-themed. At its most meaningful, history involves a good deal of art and storytelling. Pye’s book is full of both. An exuberant amalgam of sources. A fruitful way of reorienting our thinking about the past. By bringing back to life a mostly forgotten cast of medieval shippers, mauraders, thinkers and tinkerers, Pye challenges us to consider how we got to be where — and who — we are.
The New York Times Book Review
A treasure chest. [Pye] breaks most of the rules of scholarly history, but who cares? The end result is brilliantly illuminating. Pye’s creativity brings light to this once dark time.
Brilliant. Pye is a wonderful historian . . . bringing history to life like no one else.
As Michael Pye shows us in The Edge of the World , the people living around the North Sea were crucial to the birth of a new Europe. Pye, like a scholarly magpie, picks up his glittering bits from the most up-to-date academic research.
Michael Dirda - The Washington Post
An utterly beguiling journey into the dark ages of the north sea. A complete revelation. Pye writes like a dream. Magnificent.
Persuasive and eloquent. A radical perspective on the modern world. No book I have read has looked at the available evidence in the way it is presented here. A multilayered, complicated, dense book that demands time to be read and be digested but rewards by giving one plenty to chew on.
03/01/2015
★ 2015-01-04
