John Prebble Writer

[greenman11]

Found a nicely bound set called 'The Highland Trilogy - Culloden / Glencoe / The Highland Clearances' written by one John Pebble at a UBS. A bit on the pricey side so have not aquired yet.
Does any one know of this writer, read his trilogy. From what I could tell at a glance these were historical fact not fiction.

Regards,

[MacMillan of Rathdown]

Prebble's books are excellent. He also wrote the article that became the film "ZULU".

[ThistleDown]

The late John Prebble was born in England and brought up in Canada. His Fire and Sword trilogy to which you refer is well-written but hugely biased. I would look for individual p/b editions as published by Penguin. And I would look for his book on the Tay Bridge disaster. Perhaps his best.

[greenman11]

Biased in what way? I noticed that he was panned on some socialist web sites, reasons unknown. If this is too dicey please respond off thread.
Thanks,

[MacBean]

No, no, please post here Rex! You are probably as well read on the Jacobite rebellions as anyone here, and I'd really value your comments.

I liked Preble's Culloden. It's definitely not the whole story and doesn't pretend to be in any way. Failure to include important information may be seen as biased, though I don't really see it that way. It's a story from a particular point of view - from the tragic point of view of the soldiers who fought and died, were captured, or escaped. How many American books on the Revolution fail to include the British assumption that we should have been willing to pay taxes to offset the considerable costs of the French and Indian War? Are they then biased?

I'd say go ahead and read Preble, but then read other works on the same subject. Rex once posted a lovely list here.

[IRISH]

i read and loved the clearances and i'm in the middle of glencoe, with culloden on my shelf waiting to be opened. i thought the clearances was a remarkably well written book which i thoroughly enjoyed, just as i am currently enjoying glencoe.

if you have an interest in these events, i strongly recommend that you read the trilogy, perhaps best done in historical chronology (despite my not doing so...)

[Lallans]

Prebble is the best Canadian author I've never read. I've got a twin cloth bound set of his books Culloden and Glencoe all set to go. In the 70s you couldn't throw a billiard ball into a Canadian bookstore without hitting one of them. The Clearances book was less common, probably surpressed so as not to cause rioting.

[figheadair]

Another of his books, often overlooked, is The Lion in the North which is an history of the Scottish Nation and its struggle from foundation up until the '45 era.

[Biathlonman]

I first discovered Prebble's Culloden in the early 70s - and it was a revelation.

There are lots of general Scottish history surveys around, but The Lion in the North is so stylishly written you want to dip into it just to see how he treats even the most mundane event - he was that good a writer. What a stylist he was!

Prebble chose painful and tragic events to write about - but you won't find them handled better by any writer since. Pretty easy to see why he left Canada when he did - his talents would have been wasted here then.

[MacSpadger]

Mutiny is another good Prebble read. I started reading Prebble's book in the 1970's when I was a teenager in Scotland. He seemed to be writing about subjects that people wanted to know about, but that most native Scottish writers wouldn't touch.