The Saxon Chronicle: Volume 1 - The Capitalists

By Jane Ellen Swan

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0533128595
• ISBN13: 9780533128594
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Vantage Pr
• Length: 889 Pages
• Weight: 3.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 2.3" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

Northern Germany History

This is a fantastic book based on Northern German History. I highly recommend tis book to anyone interested in the historical aspects on northern Germany and in European history.

Best Detailed History of Saxony yet, and a great novel!!

While searching for some history of my ancestral areas in Anhalt-Saxony, I came across this novel, and it has not disappointed me!! While it is staged just a little bit further north, it is a better history of Germany and even the Low Countries than you can get out of most "world history books". Just last night I was tickled to find Sehnde on a MapQuest map, just a few miles west and north of the area some of my german ancestors are from!! The detail and careful connection to geographical reality just keeps you knowing where you are in space there while learning a detailed story about people from certain areas and towns, and more general history about social movements as a whole. Two maps help orient you also, but the author apologized for them saying that's all the publishers would allow her. You won't be disappointed in this Michener-type book if you want to know how old Germany developed from way back and "who" developed her!! For instance, just now our main characters are trekking with their horses and retinues south over the Harz mountains to participate in Diet of Worms about the Inquisitional happenings during the early "reformation" of the church. We learn as we go thru specific towns who is on which side and how much!! We learn where the dangerous areas were. The detail would even tickle ardent neo-pagans!! Detail on the "old religion" before conversion at the point of the swords of Charlemagne's men and the henchmen of the Catholic church is fantastic!! The book is just highly recommended for history and wonderful, mostly true, novel detail!!! Alot of philosophical analysis is also bantered between the novel's characters. Her grasp of history and philosophy is just exquisite, and probably quite unique to that area of historical development. You won't be disappointed; even some great real-life scenes and concerns! And don't forget, many of her characters are real people, our ancestors!! I verified her very correct detail on several in certain histories and genealogies.

Surprisingly interesting and authentic

My Medieval history professor at the University of Portland in 1956 made a prediction that someday, someone would write an interesting book, perhaps a historical "Fiction" about Charlemagne and his attempts to Christianize the "heathen" Saxons in what is now Germany, but in the meantime, he said, you've got to be motivated by me to read this dry drivel. He failed and I flunked history both in High school and College. Forty some years later, comes an amazing publication: "The Saxon Chronicle: The Capitalists", by Jane Ellen Swan. Because the author is my elder half-sister, who I greatly respect, and because the book was a pre-publication free copy, I read it. Jane Ellen has captured the real soul essence of the people who lived and worshipped, who fought and loved, who planned for the future and plotted against evil. These are the people who made Germany a nation that the world can be proud of and look up to. This book opens the readers eyes to a culture that differs in religion, politics and philosophy from what so many of us remember from the two World Wars. This book helps to remove the stigma created by the Nazis.Janie (Jane Ellen Swan) is world traveled, and much into genealogy, so I expected family history on the German side of her family. Yes, this book is well researched, and that's no surprise. But the pleasure of reading a good story was totally unexpected. Listen to this powerful, but short excerpt at the beginning of Chapter 4 which starts 1350 AD: "Thousands of colored lights. Sparkling, flashing, scintillating, pulsating, swirling, swirling, swirling. Stars? The Aurora? The Celestial light? And humming, humming. Throbbing, ringing, crescendoing. The wind? Bees? An angelic choir? Surely I have died and am approaching heaven. Swirling, humming, swirling, humming. How beautiful.....And suddenly she awoke.....I am alive. I have survived the Black Death...""The Saxon Chronicle: The Capitalists" at first glance appears to be a series of disjointed short stories, all dealing with the same land and the same families, but sometime separated by hundreds of years. When the reader creates heroes and favorite characters and expects them in the next chapter he might be disappointed to learn that they died 100 years before. I thought, at first, this would be a detriment, but the overall historical content is very cohesive and the story of how Capitalism developed flows well from one generation to the next. This book should be well received by serious history buffs as well as by those of us who appreciate good story telling.