I looked up "essential" in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, and found that the word didn't apply to this book, not under any of the definitions, not even the obsolete ones. It isn't a guide " ... in the absolute or highest sense," (definition 1), and it doesn't " ... [pertain] to a thing's essence," (definition 3), and isn't "Absolutely indispensable or necessary" (definition 4). Neither did I have any luck finding a definition of "definitive" suitable to the book, because it neither sets a standard, nor is it "authoritative, reliable, complete." How can it be? The films aren't finished: this book is premature.

That being said, I'll take a look at the content and organization, the writing, the illustrations, and the timeline and map before giving you my final recommendation.

The Content and Organization:

Organized into ten parts, each divided into sections and subsections for various periods or events, The Essential Chronology pretends to be history, written by historians of the New Republic, about 25 years after the Battle of Yavin, which, we are informed, in a "Note on Dating Conventions," constitutes the Year Zero for the post-Imperial galaxy. An Introduction and an Afterword bracket the "historical" narrative, with a galactic map and a time line following.

The Essential Chronology doesn't work as a guide book. The information simply isn't there: it can't be, only the barest outline of the dozens of novels, comics and films can be contained in 165 pages. For that reason, attempting to find out about a specific character or incident is far more likely than not to prove frustrating, if not entirely impossible. At this level of compression, almost everyone and everything have been left out.

Neither is it successful as the history it pretends to be. Use of the pseudo-historical conceit is ill-suited to the material. It can't work when the authors must struggle to sustain a narrative covering five thousand years of galactic history, must do so with many significant events in that history yet to be revealed, and must do so without disturbing LFL feature film continuity. They end up making a lot of fictionalized excuses, and, at critical points, obfuscating.

For example, Part Two of the Chronology, "The Empire and the New Order," tells us that "The conflict of Empire and Rebellion was known as the Galactic Civil War, and it is the single most important era of our history." But, in this book, it comes off a lot like all the earlier periods in "our history," with run-amok Sith Lords, interstellar wars -- the Republic in Perpetual Peril. The only big difference (other than that George Lucas has actually given us quasi-definitive versions of four of the six films set in this period) is Anakin Skywalker, and his destined role. But the book tells us almost nothing about that, about the prelude to this most momentous epoch in galactic history.

Though Part Two of the book deals with the events in The Phantom Menace, including Anakin's discovery and his acceptance as a Jedi Padawan, there are but five paragraphs devoted to the film, and but scant mention of the lad. There isn't even any effort made to harmonize the pre-Phantom Menace material with The Phantom Menace itself, resulting in numerous conflicts, some glaring. In Part One, Jedi Masters have multiple students. (Perhaps The Code is a late development in the Jedi Order?) The word "Padawan" is nowhere used before page 23. Midi-chlorians are nowhere mentioned, and the Force, as well as Anakin's discovery, is again, or maybe still, "mystical." (If only that were still so.) "The New Sith"[emphasis added] the only canonical Sith, are newly qualified -- just another way to paper over the continuity conflicts between the Sith comics and The Phantom Menace.

Peculiar also is the selection and treatment of those covered in Part Three of the book, "Profiles in History." Han Solo makes sense for inclusion; as do "The Skywalkers." Even Lando Calrissian -- but not at the expense of Obi-Wan Kenobi, Palpatine, Darth Vader, Young Anakin, and Grand Admiral Thrawn. Anakin Skywalker gets a bare paragraph in the section for "The Skywalkers," and little more in the summary of The Phantom Menace, even though, as "historians" writing in the Second Republic should be expected to know, Qui-Gon Jinn's discovery of the boy had profound consequences for the galaxy. Of course, had any of those characters been included, they might have suffered a game show-contestant bio like this one for the Skywalker Twins: "Like a ray of hope in the darkest night, the Skywalker twins emerged from one of the galaxy's most turbulent periods to reverse a generation of injustice and genocide." Not to mention that they received some lovely parting gifts. Maybe Obi-Wan, Thrawn, and Palpatine were better served by omission.

The portion (presumably) spanning Episode II and Episode III, and the Original Trilogy, also provides its share of obfuscation. Some wiggle-room opens up on Darth Vader's culpability for the Purge: "The Emperor's assistant, Darth Vader ... was allegedly responsible for the greatest atrocities of the Purge," [emphasis added] we learn on page 25. And, according to The Essential Chronology, Obi-Wan was reluctant to take Artoo and the Death Star plans to Alderaan [p. 49]. That's quite a shift, even where old Obi-Wan is concerned.

And there are needless gaps that go totally unexplained, and are inexplicable. For instance, the reader must wonder why the Jedi Apprentice novels are omitted from Part Two, especially when the interminable Young Jedi Knights series is included in Part Ten. One wonders if The Essential Chronology isn't meant to muddy the continuity waters: Why else put the canonical thousand generations the Jedi guarded peace and justice in the Old Republic in quotation marks, as happens on page xiii?

(But there are also some clarifications: For those of you who have thought that Luke had no clue, let alone a plan, heading into Jabba's Palace, that's been settled: On page 60, we are told that he did, indeed, have a "complex and daring plan," and this book is definitive, so it must be true. A page later, another ROTJ mystery is laid to rest: That was no body Luke shuttled to the surface of the forest moon, it was empty body armor.)

The Essential Guide to Weapons and The Essential Guide to Vehicles and Vessels, the best volumes in the series (in the opinion of this reviewer), were more limited in scope, and more successful for that very reason; they were required to sustain suspension of disbelief for only a page at a time, and each entry could easily stand alone, largely unaffected, and unafflicted, by the rest of the book, or the rest of LFL continuity -- film, novel or comic. Those guides also benefited from their "technical" nature: blasters and starships are self-contained in a way that characters and events are not, and the authors were able to supply relatively concrete specifications for their subjects without the same risk of contradiction from the episodes yet to come.

The Writing:

Nothing, not even an approach more suitable than the pseudo-historical, could have saved this volume from perhaps its greatest weakness, bad writing.

The prose style is ... Andersonian. Banal and bombastic overall, burdened with pleonasms, a superabundance of adjectives (except, strangely, when writing about a republic, republican: It seems to be the only adjective the authors ever met that they didn't want to employ), and metaphors gone awry -- sometimes it's just plain (and probably unintentionally) funny; mostly, it's dreadful. But let the prose speak for itself. Take this example, from page 14:

Next, he [Exar Kun] launched a brash, all-out attack on Coruscant itself, hoping to take down the seat of the Republic government.

(Conjures pictures of ol' Exar pantsing a few dozen senators in the Senate chamber, doesn't it?)

Or this, from page 18:

Years of consolidation and recovery followed in the aftermath of the Sith War. These were filled with more strife and more Jedi heroism.

Or this, from page 24:

The Clone Wars were a dark time for the galaxy. The thousand-thousand worlds of the Old Republic were swept up in a furious conflagration that rendered entire planets uninhabitable. Many historical archives were destroyed, while other archives covering this period were wiped clean in the years following the Emperor's ascension.

The capper, however, is this one, from page 151:

The armistice brought about by the Pellaeon-Gavrisom treaty was a durable peace. Three quiet years passed, blissfully uninterrupted by Imperial schemes, mad Jedi, local brushfires, or unexpected alien invasions.

But enough of that Sith.

The Illustrations:

Like the other volumes in the series, the Essential Chronology is illustrated. The pictures are a perfect match to the prose. They are simple, almost cartoonish, as if aimed at a much younger audience than the text would suggest (a characteristic not evident in illustrator Bill Hughes' work for The Essential Guide to Droids). Hughes' renditions of familiar characters bear little resemblance to their subjects, especially in the case of the human characters. But aliens and those with helmets don't escape unscathed, either. Darth Vader ends up looking like Dark Helmet. Yoda does not, and should not, look like Buddy Epson, but he does. Then there's page 162's illustration of Lowbacca, from the Young Jedi Knights books, looking like Jo Anne Worley.

It's not all bad, however. Hughes' drawing of Admiral Daala manages to make her attractive, and is, to date, the only thing about the Admiral this reviewer has ever found remotely interesting or appealing. Obi-Wan Kenobi also looks very much as he did in A New Hope in the sketch on page 50, even though the figures of him and Vader dueling look like caricatures.

The Timeline and Map:

The Timeline is a curious creature, with the authors' prefatory remarks puncturing the illusion of history maintained in the rest of the book: It is more or less a rudimentary bibliography (though it also includes comics, computer games, and films as well as books) in chronological order, attaching the listed items to their respective Parts and sections of the Chronology. It will get you to a specific book (or other source), or help you get your collection of Star Wars books in proper historical order (with the mysterious exception of some, but not all, Scholastic books, particularly the Jedi Apprentice books, and the Journals for major characters from Episode I and the Original Trilogy: they go unlisted). But it doesn't compare to the various on-line time lines available. Echo Station hosts Matthew Justice's Time Line ( which might not be quite as polished as the time line in the book, but is far more useful, being more detailed, and superior as a bibliography: The books and comics, even those set just before or just after Episode I, are included, the entries have the author's names and cover images, so they can be hunted down more easily; or, through the links to on-line retailers, acquired even more easily on-line.

The Map is the one made familiar by the books in the New Jedi Order series. In the larger format, in a book that can be spread out while you're reading one of the novels, it is easier to use, but still not particularly useful, owing more to the art of illustration than to the art of cartography. (Click the image to enlarge.)

My Recommendation:

If you want to get the broad outline of the novels, if you want a complete set of the guides, this book is for you. If not ... it's a bad synopsis, telling the reader little that is new, of which even less can be considered reliable while George Lucas is still at work on the prequels. Skip it. Readers in search of information about the Star Wars universe will be far better off consulting The Star Wars Encyclopedia, Slavicsek's Guide to the Star Wars Universe, and the other guide books, though they predate The Phantom Menace, its associated materials, and the New Jedi Order series.

(Dexter's passion for Star Wars, still undiminished nearly a quarter-century later, began in May 1977, when a late-night showing of A New Hope set his young imagination ablaze. An avid action figure collector, he has been known to lurk about local toy shops at ungodly hours, in hopes of beating the competition to the latest wave of Hasbro goodies. When not tracking down the latest resculpt of Darth Maul or Qui-Gon Jinn, he devotes his free time to pondering the most efficient use of his dwindling free storage space. His other passions include his library, and writing.)