Cheap The World Is Not Enough (Book) (Zoe Oldenbourg, Willard R. Trask) Price

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Customer Reviews of The World Is Not Enough

Count Your Blessings
It's pretty easy to sit in the comfort of a 21st Century easy chair and comment that a work of fiction depicts life in 12th Century France as depressing. Love is very much a commodity in our media-drenched culture--Oldenbourg is able to give romance much more value in The World is Not Enough. What a fine work of art for depicting love amid the chaos! And there are many romances throughout its pages-some successful, many are not. But romance gives these characters hope, and in describing the many relationships throughout the novel, Oldenbourg succeeds in telling us much more about how people during the time of the Crusades viewed life, death, family, money, marriage, hate, and love. When I finished the book, I felt very moved. Lucky to be born 50 or so generations after these characters, for sure, but nevertheless grateful that I was able to see how they endured (and overcame) hardship. This book is mostly about passion for life amidst a world/time/place where death was all too common. Here's the bottom line on what a romantic semi-intellect such as myself looks for in great historical fiction: if a novel can make you feel more passionate about love and your own life in the present (and this one does, admirably), then by all means recommend it to others who seek similar enlightenment. So, pick it up and find out the value of love during the tough times when Europe began to make its way out of the Dark Ages. And see if it doesn't teach you anything about the present.

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Kudos for historical accuracy. Demerits for readability.
This book has none of the painfully grating anachronisms that mar most historical fictions. Nor does the author fall to the seemingly irresistible urge to view history with contemporary values. If you want to get a feel for the medieval world without reading text books, this isn't a bad place to look. Unfortunately, *I* found the story to be about as readable as a textbook. The author went on and on with character summaries (which made the book painful to get through) yet still somehow managed to have characters which were rather two dimensional. If the author was going to drag on (and on...) about something, I'd have preferred to read more about the medieval world. To heighten the reading difficulty, the storyline is somewhat choppy. 2 stars for readability. 5 stars for true-to-life facts. Since I couldn't give 3.5 stars, I was seriously tempted to give it 3 stars (ie. average) but decided to rounded up to reward historical accuracy.

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This book is special.
I first read this book as a college student 35 years ago and was transported to a fully imagined medieval France. There is a whole world here served up by a respected medieval scholar whose nonfiction works on the Crusades are still in print. I was so glad to see her work show up in print again, long after I had despaired of finding myself another copy. This is not one of those costume dramas where the author dresses up modern personalities in fancy dress. This is an era of mindsets, goals and values different than our own. Before long you adjust to this different way of life. But like our own world and real life everywhere, not all problems get neatly resolved, not all people worthy of love find their soulmates, not all the sons understand their fathers, and not all lost people are found. This for me was one of the most profoundly mind-blowing books I read as a young woman, not just for what it taught me about history but what it taught me about life.
And now years later I find myself teaching World History. Partly because of my experience with this book, I now require my sophomore history students to read a well-researched historical novel as part of the curriculum to give them a better sense of how it was to have lived a life in another time and place. This is the book I suggest to a few gifted readers who are drawn to the medieval period, are not deterred by a thick book and want nothing more than a life-changing read. They too have been transported.