Follow Here To Purchase Guide to Spain for History Travellers (Guides for History Travellers)

Author: Bob Fowke

Publisher: YouCaxton Publishing

ASIN: B007NZLV3U (Kindle)

If you’re taking a trip to Spain, this slim volume won’t substitute for a Fodor’s travel guide, but it will likely enhance your travel experience. Bob Fowke has covered Spain’s historic destinations in an unconventional way, owing to the liberal sprinkling of enlightening and amusing anecdotes. It makes for an entertaining foray into what could have been dusty topics. Instead of dry and boring, history is told in short bursts of colorful and lively passages.

Fowke’s tone is engaging and witty, and he has written the book at a level that would appeal to readers from middle school on up. In fact, this book would be an excellent first resource for young readers, as it gives a brief introduction to so many subjects. For instance, the author traces the families that held the monarchy in Spain, a theme so complex that it spans volumes in any library. Learning just a little bit about the Spanish royalty should pique the interest of older history buffs or younger royal watchers and raise new avenues to explore. The short synopses definitely provided me with a gateway to further study of locations and events. In addition, Fowke interjects plenty of Spanish words with their meanings, offering a brief lesson in the language. His love of wordplay is obvious as well, as he skillfully uses language to add to the humor.

The author seems to have arranged the material in a strictly chronological fashion, which works from a history standpoint but possibly not a travel angle. This raises my only criticism of the book: it would have been helpful to those of us unfamiliar with Spain’s geography if Fowke would have included maps, because I think that visiting the sites in chronological order would create a rather circuitous route. But with no map to guide the reader, the locations weren’t always discernible, leaving me to wonder which sites might be clustered within a day’s drive.

Bob Fowke is noted for writing about history in an approachable manner, with over 60 books to his credit. He has focused that skill through a tourist’s eyes to acquaint newcomers to historically noteworthy sites in a country that he seems to be intimately familiar with, through his own excursions and because he has a firm grasp of history.