Guus Bosman

When I visited the Netherlands last October I spent a very nice day with my parents in Amsterdam. After we visited a great museum, we went to the Scheltema bookstore at the Koningsplein where I bought "Nederlandse Historien".

This is a new translation of arguably the best-known Dutch history book. It's written by by P.C. Hooft and the original edition, according to Brittanica, is from 1642.

The book describes the revolution in the Netherlands against the Spanish emperor. The author takes a side in the conflict, and doesn't hide his sympathy for the 'heroic Dutch' who are fighting the 'evil Spaniards'.

This new edition is wonderful. There original Dutch from 350 years ago is now hard to read, so the entire text has been modernized and explained to contemporary readers. Modern Dutch uses shorter sentences and less conjunctions; the introduction has a nice explanations of the type of changes that were made to the text. The new edition provides lots of footnotes and introductory sections.

The story in the book is fascinating, about a revolutionary war and the politics on both side during the decades that the book covers. There's quite a lot of torturing in the book, and it's rather explicit about the ways prisoners are made to confess.

It is well-known that the Prince of Orange was murdered, so I was expecting this to happen in the book. When the author talked about a French guy who was trying to kill him, I figured that this was one of the failed attempts -- I had never heard the name before. Turns out, the killer used a fake name to gain access to the Prince, and his real name was indeed the notorious Balthasar Gerard.