The only reason I don't give this book four stars is that it takes about 100 pages to get into, quite a bit for a 400-odd page book, until you consider that it is really a ~6500 page epic divided into 20 chapters. This epic is life, neatly set out in black type, and anyone with a life today will appriciate how similar it is to life 200 years ago. A note of caution, though: if you get through those first hundred pages, you may not be able to put these works down until you've read all twenty volumes.