Name: The Armada
ISBN: 9780618565917

Garrett Mattingly

Chronicles events surrounding the 1588 defeat of the Spanish Armada and explains its effects on European history.

The Armada

Dana Kraft

I enjoyed this although it was a little tough to get through.  As advertised, it reads like a fiction book.  The accounts of battles were hard for me to follow mostly because they were quite detailed and I'm pretty ignorant of the local geography and of sailing terms.  The author might have used a bit of high language - you can be the judge on this quote from Ch 29,  " the flow of vituperative billingsgate with which these arguments were accompanied would seem to a modern reader somewhat to weaken their force..."

If you read this don't skip the Epilogue! That's where the real payoff was for me. Although this was written in 1959, I found this quote about the difficulty of the religious war between Catholics and Protestants to be relevant to the 21st century.  "Systems  of ideas, though usually self-limiting in their spread, are harder to kill than men, or even nations.  Of all the kinds of was, a crusade, a total war against a system of ideas, is the hardest to win."

The Armada

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