The Celts by Jean Markale

The author deserves credit for taking on such a difficult and ambitious project…yet it must be said that this book is full of unwarranted assertions and loose interpretations. Most of what we know about the Celts comes either from what their enemies wrote about them or from Celtic mythology, neither of which are very reliable sources. Markale is entirely too liberal in his interpretations and conclusions, and as a result I cannot help feeling at the end of this work that he has taken his readers for a ride. The Celts were certainly a people who deserve serious study, but they left no written historical records for us to go on, which leaves them at the mercy of imaginative historians like Markale. Not to say that this book wasn’t interesting, but I would hardly regard it as authoritative.