Jeanne D'Arc: her life and death (2024)

A very good place to start with learning about Joan of Arc. I started out with a four star rating, but moved it up to five.

A poignant account of her life. In a case like this is difficult to get beneath all of the passion, and conjecture that surround her life and present a full picture of the events described. This book does offer a somber insight to the depths of human venality. Even centuries past it is a difficult scene to encounter.

Biraz ağır ama tek kelimeyle ilham verici. Ağırdan kastım 100 sayfa boyunca sorgulama ve mahkeme eğer ilgi alanınız ya da uğraştığınız bişey değilse

If you are looking for a book about Joan of Arc that has no more information than the Wikipedia article on her but is as lengthy as the Old Testament, this is the book for you. Mz. Oliphant drones on and on for pages and pages about seemingly unimportant details, but then describes key events in Joan's life as if they are trivial. It was almost as if Mz. Oliphant decided, before writing the book, that all the important stuff had already been covered somewhere else so she would write about the unimportant stuff instead. The battles read like: Joan freed such-and-such city. The trial reads like a bad transcript of a bad movie based on a bad book about Joan of Arc: Joan said this, then that, then was returned to her cell.

The remainder of the book is filled with fluffy babbling that for the most part didn't assist with understanding Joan's predicament. The first chapter of the book describes the political fragmenting of France at the time, which does help the reader understand a bit how Joan ended up on trial after defending her own country, but again this goes on for pages and utilizes the most boring, lengthy sentences possible. It was worse than reading an actual text book on the history of France. Which brings me to one other complaint: sprinkled throughout the book are words and phrases and entire sentences in French, most with no translation presented. Now I can certainly fire up an online translation tool, but come on, this is just annoying. I should have just learned French and read some other book on Joan of Arc in it's original language. At least then I would've gotten something out of it!

Maybe out of the entire book there were a dozen or so redeeming paragraphs that provided some insight into Joan's personality, but that doesn't make it worth the pain of reading the entire book. I think Mark Twain's book on Joan is a much easier and more interesting read, and though it is written in the style of a historical fiction, Twain did his homework and I would say his portrayal of Joan and her key achievements are accurate. I would recommend reading it (or any other book on Joan of Arc, really!) over this one.

An interesting account of life in a mad-house, and the mistreatment the patients were subjected to. However, if you are looking for gory details, look elsewhere, since this book does not focus on that. This is an account of a young female journalist, who posed as being slightly mad, and was sent to an asylum, but was not place in the worst part of the island, where I suppose the treatment would have been worse.

I wanted to know the story of Jeanne d'arc and I achieved that goal with this book. However this author did not put forth any effort to make it easy and enjoyable to read.

I would recommend giving another version a try.

This 1896 book surprised me. The author comes across well as an expert authority on Saint Joan of Arc. There is a lot of information and a peek into the personal life of the saint, but some of it was hard to stomach. Particularly, the author states that Joa