2013 read #23: Sailing from Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World by Colin Wells.

Sailing from Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World by Colin Wells
297 pages
Published 2006
Read from February 9 to February 14
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

When I was a kid, I got most of my books used, or through surplus outlets. One of the first history books I ever got was a surplus outlet find, a Cliffs Notes summary of ancient Greece and Rome. At least, I think it was Cliffs Notes, but I was only about 10, and I can't remember it now with any certainty. Regardless, I do recollect that it was meant to be an abridged study aid, not a stand-alone examination of detailed history, dispensing with an emperor in a sentence or two, a philosophy in a paragraph.

I mention this because Sailing from Byzantium reminded me of that book. Wells compresses a thousand years of complicated intellectual history, from three broad, culturally distinct areas of the world, into less than three hundred pages. He rifles through names and dates as if prepping you for a midterm, and rarely pauses to give a real sense of time and place and personality, or offer more than the thinnest skein of connective tissue between events and persons. His simple prose is journalistic rather than elegant -- it doesn't leave much of an impression. Even the book's organization, split by region rather than narrated chronologically, annoyed me. I came away from this book bored and feeling like I didn't learn much of substance.

Which is a pity, because I love every subject it covers: Byzantium itself, the Renaissance, early Muslim science and philosophy, early Slavic/Russian history. Split it into three more substantial books, or triple its length and content, and Sailing from Byzantium would probably rank among my favorite history sources. But alas. I won't blame this book directly for my recent reading slump; I will say it was easy to put it aside for days at a time while I rediscovered the joys of television and the internet.

Which isn't to say it's entirely without merit as it is. The first third of the book, skimming through Byzantine influences on the Italian Renaissance, was too brief and summary to have much worth, but I enjoyed the sections on Syrian translation of ancient Greek texts as well as the spread of Orthodox influence into Slavic populations, two subjects I've wanted to learn about but haven't explored in any detail. In those areas, Sailing from Byzantium amounted to a tasty free sample, just enough information to keep me intrigued, not enough to satisfy. I sure wish my library had more thorough books on those subjects, so I didn't have to settle for this ultimately inadequate morsel.