Peter Hetherington

A few thoughts about the book:

*First off, the author is by no means a trained historian, and makes no claim to be anything of the such (he's a "petroleum geologist" as the back cover states).

*He also has no connection to Poland, Pilsudski, or Eastern Europe in general, but decided to write the book after reading about interwar Europe and seeing Pilsudski's name come up with no explanation as to why he mattered; though he conceded there were plenty of biographies written, he said they were either "highly subjective" or not as "comprehensive as [he] desired, nor written for an audience unfamiliar with Polish history."

*However perhaps being unfamiliar with Poland, its language, customs and history, he deliberately left out diacritics in the names of people and places. While he writes this was done as the book was "intended for an English-speaking audience," it drastically alters the pronunciation of certain words. The most egregious example would be the name Pilsudski itself, which should be properly rendered as "Pi³sudski" (I am aware of the irony of critiquing this while writing the name without diacritics, but as this is not a formal setting, I think you can forgive me).

*While the bibliography is extensive, it is notable for two omissions that quickly would betray the fact that the author is not a trained historian. The first one is the lack of any primary sources whatsoever; while he does utilise a book Pilsudski wrote about his early career, and a biography written by his wife after his death, everything else is secondary sources that could be pulled off any university library shelf. The second issue is that these are all English-language sources; for a Lithuanian-born Polish head of state who fought in the Austro-Hungarian military against Russia, then allied with France and the UK against both Germany and the Soviet Union, while dealing with substantial Ukrainian, Belarusian and Jewish minorities, there is nothing in any other language.

*There are several spelling and grammatical errors throughout the book. While this is more to the fault of the editor and publisher than the writer, it still is annoying to deal with. Especially when they were as frequent as in this book (I noticed at least 5 separate instances in a 700+ page book).

That all said, the book isn't terrible. Its the first English-language biography of Pilsudski to be published in several decades, and incorporates a brief history of Poland at the start to give the reader an idea of what the situation of the country is. And it is quite thorough, going over the life of Pilsudski in fine detail, often without any bias (as the author claimed other biographies had). But I would think that while a noble cause, Hetherington should have probably left the historical writing to a trained historian.… (más)