314 pages
Published 2025
Read from April 1 to April 6
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
I began the reading year strong, but in the last few weeks, my attention span has petered out for one reason and another. (The shadow of a mad king with his thumbs on the nuclear buttons has a lot to do with it.) Whenever my reading falters, I find it helps to get my hands on an interesting but breezy non-fiction book, shaking up my typical diet of fantasy. That’s particularly apropos this year; this is the first work of non-fiction I’ve picked up in all of 2026.
Histories of cultural exchange are one of my big hyperfocuses. I love histories that concern themselves less with kings and wars and more with actual humans. All our cultural myths of “peoples” and “races,” assembled in the early modern era of nation states, fall apart against the reality of how much people, and culture, have always mixed and intermingled. Modern day fash might love the Romans because of their martial misogyny and oppressive hierarchy; I love Roman history because of how people moved all over the empire, from Syria and Mauritania to Britain and Dacia. Despotic elites, not immigrants, caused Rome to fall. There are lessons to learn there.
The Far Edges is right up my alley, offering quick examinations of places at the edges of empire, from ancient cattle herders at Lake Turkana to the city of Co Loa in what is now Vietnam. Rees writes a popularly accessible history in competent, unremarkable prose. Each chapter offers an appetizer of a much vaster, richer story, leaving me wanting more. Honestly, I’d read a book-length examination of any of the sites Rees describes. And that, as always, is the takeaway from books like this: I wish there were more to it.
