A Brief History of the Samurai

A Brief History of the Samurai is a book by Joanathan Clements.  It is 319 pages, and covers a little more than a thousand years of the samurai class in Japan.  It is a good primer, but, it is hard to get a grip on Japanese history up to the Tokugawa reign because of all the players and all the rieign changes and civil wars.  I've never really studied the hhistories of European nations before those countries stabilized so I wonder if Japanese history is that much more complicated.  I feel pretty lucky that U.S. history is relatively simpler compared to older nations.