Reddit reviews The Wars of the Roses

Fair warning, the War of the Roses is a very complex and dense topic to dive into. Any book you pick up worth it's salt, will have (and better have) at least two chapters dedicated to just background before you even begin to get to the foundations of the causes for the War. The WotR is easily the most defining moment in English history between the Norman invasion and the Civil War and covers decades of history, literally.

Having said that, while this is not my subject area, and I'm not terribly well read in the topic, I do have a recommendation for a book that sits astride "popular history" and "academic history". I say that, because again, this is a dense subject and no book that is worth your time would be purely "pop history".

Alison Weir's War of the Roses, does a good job of making the subject accessible to readers of history, though not to fans of "lite history." "Lite History" to me are those pulpy history paperbacks that tend to populate the military history sections of bookstores about Navy Seals, Special Forces, Nazis, and those god awful books about the Merovingians being descendants of Jesus.

While the book only has one footnote that I can recall (giving a rough estimation of price equivalencies between 14th century money and late 20th Century), it does have an extensive bibliography and helpful index. Footnoting would be helpful in knowing the sources and providing additional information (my favorite thing about footnotes!) provided, but since the book is not "academic" its overlooked. The most helpful addition to the book are simplified family trees which I promise will be useful as the overlapping and twisting mixtures of marriages, second cousins, and family offshoots played a major part in being the cause and agitator of the war, and I promise you will refer to it more than once.

While the writing style is very casual and doesn't run down various rabbit hole topics that would fascinate an academic (and confuse the casual), it is still very dense. Keeping track of the names of the players, which Houses they were loyal to, and what role they play requires close attention to be paid or you will find yourself backtracking. I myself restarted the book three or four times before I reached page 100 over the years as I easily became lost and confused. I don't fault the writer at all as this was my first book on the subject and I often found myself lost. You will still need to sit quietly and read alone; this is not a book to read on a busy cross town bus, its by no means is a summer page turner.

Weir has a background in history, but is not a formal academic. She focuses mostly on historical fictions and biographies of England's royalty from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance. You can clearly tell that she has strong familiarity with the subject, knows how to research, and is thorough in covering the topics she tries to tackle (though through out her career some have been better than others). She presents her works in a way that makes complex histories and dense materials accessible to those who want to go beyond a tv documentary familiarity but not ready to delve into the dense undergrowth of an academic book.

For a casual yet informative and quality work, I recommend Alison Weir's War of the Roses.

Just don't use it as a source for your history paper.

My favorite: Alison Weir

Alison Weir is a good mix of informative and readable; this book in particular would be a good start.

The Royal Stuarts by Alan Massie is a fantastically written account of the Stuart dynasty, from their origins in Scotland to their ultimate fall in the early 18th century.

The Plantagenets by Dan Jones an equally enthralling account of the Plantagenet dynasty (the Angevin line), from Henry II to Richard II--which I believe will give you what you're looking for in the medieval period. More books along this line could be Edward III: The Perfect King by Roger Mortimer which gives a much more in-depth and nuanced view of one of England's greatest monarchs (as well as some controversial opinions of Mortimer's regarding Edward II). Another of Mortimer's books Henry IV: The Righteous King gives a good, well-written look at the "usurper" of the Angevin line and the beginning of the reign of the House of Lancaster.

You might then move on to The Wars of the Roses by Alison Weir or The Wars of the Roses by Dan Jones for a good account of the tumultuous civil wars of the 15th century (I've read the former twice and adore it; I have not yet had the opportunity to read Jones' sequel).

I too am still searching for a satisfying biography of Cromwell!