2024 read #157: Emperor of Rome by Mary Beard.

Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World by Mary Beard

479 pages

Published 2023

Read from December 21 to December 25

Rating: 4 out of 5

The follow-up to Beard’s SPQR, Emperor is an examination of the office of Roman emperor, and the popular perceptions of the autocratic edifice, more than it is a biography of any particular caesar, or (worse still) a recitation of names and dates. This is Beard’s familiar approach, and a solid example why she’s one of the few popular historians I would trust to write a book on Rome. This is no “Big Man” history. As Beard writes in her prologue:

Working on the Roman empire for so long, I have come increasingly to detest autocracy as a political system, but to be more sympathetic, not just to its victims, but to all those caught up in it from bottom to top….

Accordingly, she works to populate the palace with glimpses of the women, slaves, laborers, functionaries, poets, doctors, diviners, entertainers, children, and the other essential-but-ignored foundations of the Roman state. The office of emperor is a lens, bending the apparatus of ancient society into our line of sight. Ancient propaganda regarding “good” and “bad” emperors is treated not as historical fact, but as a means of assessing attitudes and fears held by the elite (or, when we can access them, the ordinary people) toward the autocrats above them.

Beard’s thesis could be summed up with a line in chapter five: “Can we ever see a human being through the spin, the propaganda, the praise and denunciations?” It’s a salutary perspective, especially in our contemporary culture, where the loudest voices are paid shills for authority, and mediocre white men think about “the Roman Empire” multiple times a day.

Like the rest of us, Beard sounds more exhausted than she did in 2015. Emperor lacks some of the sparkle and dry wit of SPQR, but remains a thoroughly engrossing history, with something important to say about our own era of looming autocracy.

2024 read #143: The Fires of Vesuvius by Mary Beard.

The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found by Mary Beard

337 pages

Published 2008

Read from November 21 to November 27

Rating: 4 out of 5

Remember a couple years ago, when there was that meme of asking young men how often they think about the Roman Empire? Rome has been a playground for the fascist imagination since, well, the invention of fascism. (It’s right there in the name!) What should be studied as an era of culture contact and movement of trade and peoples between continents is, instead, a minefield of shitty takes and the hard-ons of contemporary would-be authoritarians.

Mary Beard’s Roman histories are among the few that I would trust for this particular subject. Always no-nonsense, Beard’s prose is fluent and a touch wry, cutting through the later bullshit that often adheres to Roman history. She never romanticizes or fetishizes the Roman world, and doesn’t shy away from the heinous inequalities, vile sexism, appalling hierarchies, or autocratic tendencies of Roman society.

Vesuvius is splendidly constructed. Beard takes us step by step through life in Pompeii, beginning with the roads and taking us through personages, trades, government, religion, and so much more in between. 

2024 read #141: Magic: A History by Chris Gosden.

Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present by Chris Gosden

465 pages

Published 2020

Read from October 15 to November 15

Rating: 3 out of 5

It's been a long time since I regularly read nonfiction. When I say I struggled with this book, that’s entirely on me. (And on the election. And on life stress before that.) Gosden’s prose is dry and a touch academic, but should be quite readable to anyone whose attention span hasn’t been fried by the last four, eight, twelve years of ~everything~.

And right in the middle of reading this book, we got set back so many decades, and have so many decades of work ahead of us to undo the damage, if it can even be undone.

Magic is a broad overview (perhaps too broad) of the role and practice of magic in human societies over the last forty thousand or so years. The scope of Gosden’s thesis tends to crowd and minimize each region and time period, with sometimes unfortunate results. It’s one thing to say that life during the Ice Age is beyond the conception of modern minds; it’s quite another to write “Understanding Chinese thought and action requires considerable imaginative effort, but is definitely worthwhile.” Wild to see something that amounts to the cliche of the “inscrutable East” get published in 2020.

Gosden’s occasional otherization aside, I would love for any of these chapters to get expanded into a full length book. My own bias would be for Paleolithic, Mesolithic, or Neolithic cultures, or perhaps for Early Modern learned magic, but I would adore a more in-depth examination of anything in here.

2024 read #7: In the Land of Giants by Max Adams.

In the Land of Giants: A Journey through the Dark Ages by Max Adams

446 pages

Published 2016

Read from January 10 to January 15

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Regardless of any intent (or lack of it) from the respective publishers, I feel this book functions as a spiritual sequel to Charlotte Higgins' Under Another Sky. Where Higgins traveled Britain in search of its Roman history, Adams paces around the archipelago to encounter its early medieval history. Adam even begins his narrative at Hadrian’s Wall, a fittingly literal symbol for the end of Roman Britain.

The “Dark Ages” — locally defined as the five centuries between the end of Roman Britain and the death of Alfred the Great — are dubbed such because of the lack of contemporary written sources and readily dateable artifacts (such as coins or inscriptions), which makes it impossible to draw together any real narrative account. In Giants, Adams leans instead into an experiential approach, journeying on foot, by boat, and sometimes by motorbike through historically laden landscapes:

What counts, on this sort of journey, is the sense of place, the passing of time. There is no better way to insinuate oneself into the Dark Age mind than to camp close to the ramparts of an ancient fort on the edge of the limitless sea and ponder the spiritual and secular worlds of those who built it.

Adams presents a nice mix of historical reference and walking adventures, the latter more diligently detailed than some Appalachian Trail memoirs I could name. It is, in many ways, reminiscent of Robert Macfarlane’s travelogues, such as The Old Ways, though Adams’ prose (while solid enough) never reaches the poetic strata of Macfarlane’s finest. However, the chapters where Adams describes riding his motorcycle instead of hiking are much less interesting.

Landscape archaeology fascinates me. It aligns with my own interests in nature and how human societies integrate themselves into (or else bludgeon their way through) ecological systems and geological constraints. I particularly enjoyed how Adams underlined the usefulness of place-names in reconstructing histories of settlement and land management. Sadly, landscape archaeology was barely touched upon during my undergraduate career, amounting to maybe a single slide during an intro course, likely a single paper during a theory class. I’d love to read more about it, especially something that grounds it in testable hypotheses rather Adams’ penchant for vibes. (Though to be fair to him, it would be impossible in our capitalist world to get the funds and workforce needed to excavate or even survey a fraction of the sites we would need to study from this book alone.)

Giants’ historical content is of the space-saving school that assumes you’re already familiar with the outlines of the period (or, perhaps, might be motivated to look up various kings and kingdoms on your own time). At least there’s a chronology appended to the end, though it could use more detail, especially with a time period so dimly known even to those who study it.

2023 read #123: Under Another Sky by Charlotte Higgins.

Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain by Charlotte Higgins

257 pages

Published 2013

Read from October 23 to October 24

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Recently, a meme of sorts has been circulating, exposing just how much your average cis-het white guy thinks about the Roman Empire on a daily basis. The underlying cause, like so much else in this modern hellscape, is a careful system of fascist indoctrination. Empires and conquest are masculine. Discipline and obedience to order are masculine. Marching into new lands and holding an eagle banner aloft are masculine. You don’t wanna be a fem, right, buddy?

I’ve always been a history girl, and here in America, Romans are always propagandistically positioned as our spiritual and political forebears. Athens had a (severely circumscribed) “democracy,” sure, but Romans? They had a republic. Landed men of breeding and prestige ruling over a rabble of mindless plebeians, as God and George Washington intended. A lost golden age for mediocre white dudes. And when Julius Caesar marched in like a main character and turned that republic into a dictatorship — well, sure it was a shame, but wasn’t it full of glory? So yeah. It isn’t any surprise to me that white American men think a lot about the Romans. Just look at how they vote.

It sucks how much the Romans are used as a tool of rightwing propaganda, because I find the Roman era fascinating for entirely different reasons: culture contact spanning parts of three continents, the movements of people and trade goods, people from all corners of the empire winding up in every other corner of the empire. Villas in Yorkshire, mystery cults in London, garum unloaded along the Thames, Iraqis and Algerians manning Hadrian’s Wall — that’s what interests me. Fuck empire, fuck emperors, fuck the legions. Tell me about the day-to-day.

Naturally I picked up this book the moment I saw it in a used book store. But it was equally natural that I should avoid reading it, given our current descent into fascism. (Recall the etymology of fascist.) I felt a sort of shame at the current associations of Rome, even though no one else really reads my reviews. Plus, with an era so heavily propagandized, you never know if an author is going to hit you with some rightwing bullshit. I’d just rather not, you know?

Under Another Sky is less about recovering a sense of what Roman Britain was like and more about the cultural process of interpretation, investigating the ways various eras have construed the Roman period as a reflection of their own mores and outlooks — “manifestations of the historical imaginations of those who described them,” as Higgins puts it in her introduction. She expands: “‘Britain’ was an idea for the Romans. For us, ‘Roman Britain’ is also an idea….”

Higgins’ narrative is constructed from her own travels, by foot and by VW camper van, across Roman Britain. The result is thoroughly readable but somewhat journalistic, full of colorful locals who pop in for two paragraphs to help Higgins make a point, followed by an equally brief anecdote of a rain-thwarted picnic to add atmosphere. Long segments are dedicated to pocket biographies of 19th century antiquarians and 20th century archaeologists, and how their personal biases shaped their interpretations. Pretty standard stuff for contemporary non-fiction, but it doesn’t give a sense of depth, either to history or to Higgins’ journeys.

At times, though, Higgins’ prose and imagery are quite beautiful. The chapter in which she walks around the surviving traces of Londinium is particularly good. Another Sky is far from an information-dense tome, but it works perfectly well for what it is.

2023 read #41: Weavers, Scribes, and Kings by Amanda H. Podany.

Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East by Amanda H. Podany

557 pages

Published 2022

Read from April 13 to April 25

Rating: 4 out of 5

A vast survey of Mesopotamian history, constrained only to the times and places that gave us records inscribed in cuneiform, this book promised it would pay particular attention to the traces of common people normally ignored in such historical surveys: slaves, brewers, artisans, merchants, priestesses, the titular weavers. That’s an irresistible selling line. I went back and forth about whether to invest all that money on buying a tome, but in the end I have no regrets.

I might take issue with this book’s execution — Podany spends much (maybe even most) of the book in the company of kings instead of weavers. But all the kings-and-wars bullshit is sadly necessary to relate the rest of this volume to the standard histories we might be taught, a grounding context of empires and conquest that Americans certainly expect from their history books. (Also unfortunate but expected: tying the later chapters in with Biblical “history.”) We could have done with a lot fewer kings here, but it could have been a lot worse.

The fact that Podany spends as much time as she does with common folk and merchants and scribes elevates Weavers far above the likes of, say, Susan Wise Bauer’s The History of the Ancient World, which was all Great Men all the time (and was all the worse for it). Any history book that at least attempts to get away from Great Men narratives deserves accolades.

2022 read #48: London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd.

London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd

775 pages

Published 2000

Read from approximately January 15, 2021 to December 21, 2022

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

After reading so much during the month of October, my attention span got redirected to other hyperfocuses for a while. (I played Fable II start to finish for the first time since 2012 or so, and then followed it up with Fable III.) Books slipped through the cracks. Part of the problem was, nothing seemed to hold my interest. Books I'd have devoured in a day back in October I could only read a page or two at a time before giving up.

Fortuitously, "a page or two at a time" happens to be an excellent way to read London: The Biography.

I first tried to read this book back in 2013 or 2014. At one point I called it "My favorite book that I never finished." It consists of chapter after chapter -- some seventy-nine altogether -- each of them a rambly assemblage of anecdotes drawn from primary and secondary sources loosely grouped around a theme (e.g., alcohol, theater, sound, the crowd, Clerkenwell, the children of the city, the Underground, etc.). It's a fine book to have on hand and maybe read whatever random chapter appeals to you that day, but it's a bear to read cover to cover. I gave up maybe halfway through. I picked it up again last year while sort of casting about for anything to distract me in the wake of some traumatic life changes. Again, I only got about halfway in before setting it aside.

So last month, when I found myself in the mood to peck my way through a book that didn't require sustained attention, I turned once again to London. This time I resumed where I'd left off. I wouldn't remember much of the book, but I wouldn't need to.

Ackroyd spends the bulk of London reiterating what, at this point in his writings, seems to have been his major theme: Certain places in England keep attracting the same sort of personalities, events, and vibes through the centuries. In essentially every chapter he provides a litany of mildly curious coincidences and historical parallels -- for example, the long history of revolutionary thought in Clerkenwell -- and is content to call it "the spirit of London" or attribute it to a given neighborhood's "genius loci." More rigorous sociological explanations receive little attention. The same motif animates Ackroyd's Albion and Thames: The Biography. That's a lot of words for such a slender thesis. Ackroyd's vision of egalitarian London also seems a bit optimistic twenty-two years and one Brexit later.

After considering London "my favorite book I never finished" for so long, closing the cover this final time felt anticlimactic. Perhaps that can be attributed to the general listlessness and anhedonia as we head into year four of a global pandemic and also continue to endure all the ills of modern capitalism.

Perhaps Ackroyd's chapter on the Blitz captured the current mood best: "The intended victims [of the V1 firebombings] became depersonalised.... The general mood was one of 'strain, weariness, fear and despondency.' 'Let me get out of this' was the unspoken wish visible upon every tired and anxious face, while at the same time the inhabitants of London carried on with their customary work and duties. The mechanism continued to operate, but now in a much more impersonal manner; the whole world had turned into a machine, either of destruction or of weary survival."

2018 read #22: The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt by Toby Wilkinson.

The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt by Toby Wilkinson
509 pages
Published 2010
Read from October 2 to October 19
Rating: 3 out of 5

An incident early in this book illustrates the dangers of focusing your history tome on the deeds and concerns of kings rather than on the people whose labor actually does the hard business of creating history. Mere pages after briefly acknowledging the sheer misery and life-crushing demands of being a serf in ancient Egypt—squeezed between laboring for the monuments of the elite and having to pay the king rent for the very land they farm—Wilkinson adopts a rhetorical posture rooting for the god-kings during a period of weakened authority and social turmoil: "What the state needed was another strong leader in the mold of Narmer, someone with the charisma, strength, and determination to rebuild the edifice of power before all was lost.... Ancient Egyptian civilization may never have progressed beyond its formative stage, may never have developed its distinctive pyramids, temples, and tombs, had it not been for [Khasekhem,] the last ruler of the Second Dynasty...." Khasekhem committed his land and his people to three millennia of forced labor and brutal autocracy, but hey, at least he saved the pyramids, guys!

To his credit, Wilkinson peppers his kingly narrative with scenes from the lives of the commonfolk, on those rare occasions when those scenes are preserved—usually whenever someone works their way up from the lower ranks into the inner circle of the pharaohs, maybe once a Dynasty or so. But these interludes barely intrude upon the lists of kings and temples, priests and generals, the privileged figureheads whose deeds and misdeeds comprise the bulk of Wilkinson's narrative. It is hard to give voice to the voiceless masses of history; only specialists in social history even seem inclined to try.

For what it sets out to do, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt is interesting, readable, and informative. The popular concept of ancient Egypt, I discovered, mixes and matches themes and decorations from nearly three thousand years of history—the sacred cat and crocodile mummies alongside Tutankhamen, buried together in the pyramid of Khufu. It's reminiscent of the joke from Futurama when a historical reenactor portraying Ghandi says, "Let's disco dance, Hammurabi!" The bigger picture of slow growth and morphing of religious and physical culture over those millennia, responding to influxes from or expansion into Nubia, the Levant, and Libya, was a fascinating topic that Wilkinson explored at length (though usually framed by the god-state cult of pharaohnic rule).

As with so many other ambitious history tomes, this is a worthy read, though one that lacked much in the way of social history outside the halls of power.

2018 read #16: Mesopotamia by Gwendolyn Leick.

Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City by Gwendolyn Leick
315 pages
Published 2001
Read from September 10 to September 21
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

As a youngster, I had been enthralled by all the most ancient "civilizations," as they were defined by my brother's 6th grade social studies textbook: Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, the Yellow River Valley. Egypt was the easiest to learn more about, which led me into a period of Egyptomania up until my tween years, but this was strictly because Egypt is far more ingrained in our pop history than any of the other river valley agricultural regions. The only other place young Rick discovered "information" relating to the Indus Valley, for example, was in a book about the Bermuda Triangle, and to this day I have only read one book that covered ancient China in any detail (and what a disappointing read it was). As Leick herself puts it in her preface, of the ancient civilizations, "Only Egypt, which is for us almost entirely defined by its morbid obsession with life after death, has continued to fascinate the public.... The Mesopotamian peoples... with their less spectacular art and crumbling mudbrick ruins, have no comparable place in the public imagination."

Which is an outright shame. My undergraduate career almost steered me into a future amid the pre-urban agricultural milieu of the Neolithic period, thanks to a research paper on the site of Tell Sabi Abyad, and to this day I feel an urge to tell each and every person I know how freakin' cool it is that town-dwelling people, supplied only with stone tools, had an advanced administrative system based on stamp-seals and counting tokens, long before the development of metallurgy or written language. The lack of popular interest in the ancient history and prehistory of Southwest Asia baffles me. This is where so many plant crops and animals were domesticated! This is where (so far as we know) people started living in substantial, permanent towns! The modern world, for better or for worse (and there's a lot to be said for both extremes), would not exist without the cultures of the Fertile Crescent. Yet your proverbial Patty and Joe just wanna gawk at mummies.

Even my undergrad years didn't teach me much about historical (as opposed to prehistoric) Mesopotamia. Leick's Mesopotamia fills a vital gap in my education; I only wish it were longer, more vividly written, and better supplied with charts, tables, plans, and illustrations. Leick spends a lot of time describing ancient floorplans when a sketch map would convey it far more clearly. That's more the fault of the publisher, however, and the amount of labor and ink they were willing to pay for; Mesopotamia, alas, remains a niche interest in America, even after nearly two decades of direct colonial occupation of the region.

One thing I was amazed to learn: The earliest cities qua cities in Mesopotamia, as represented in Leick's chronological organizational scheme by Eridu, were far more egalitarian, even democratic, than pop history had ever told me. Women and men held positions in society far more equal than they would hold over the ensuing 5500 years of urban civilization. There was little differentiation visible arising from wealth inequality, either. In Leick's telling, the idea of a city began as a cooperative, mutualist affair—something none of my cultural anthropology courses touched on, with their tidy narrative that agriculture correlates with emerging disparities in wealth and gender. The inequalities we associate with, well, all of written history crept in gradually, but Eridu, at least, sounds wonderful—an example that should be known throughout the urban societies of today..

Mesopotamia is an important and revelatory history, not just of the Land Between the Rivers but of the emerging concept of the city itself as a social body. I'd love for a fully updated edition of it to come out, double the length, offering a more sweeping panorama of its vast subject (and, naturally, supplied with way more tables and floorplans). In its present form, it left me wanting far more.

2016 read #70: Laughter in Ancient Rome by Mary Beard.

Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up by Mary Beard
278 pages
Published 2014
Read from September 4 to September 9
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

I enjoyed Mary Beard's snark and snappy-but-educational style in her popular history, SPQR -- so much so that, after I finished it, I immediately looked up her other works. This one caught my eye: a book about Roman laughter and jokes from a scholar gifted with that rare combination of wit, writing ability, and authoritative knowledge. What could possibly be better?

I suspected my error the moment inter-library loan put the volume in my hands and I saw it was from the University of California Press, published as part of a line of classical lecture series. I still enjoyed Laughter, but it was a dense, technical work, full of the convolutions of postmodern scholarship in the humanities. (Beard vows in the preface, "My aim is to make the subject of Roman laughter a bit more complicated, indeed a bit messier, rather than to tidy it up.") This is a worthy goal -- fatuous simplifications and over-general "explanations" are a pest to be rooted out and burned away -- but the English language has yet to arrive at a fluent way to handle the necessary backtrackings, subordinate clauses, and complexification of statements this entails. I'm having a hard time even getting across what I mean (though, to be fair to myself, I've been out of academia for six years, and it's unseasonably hot and sticky as I struggle to write this review). Beard pushes bravely through the thickets of po-mo social science and emerges with, mostly, a surprisingly readable work, but popular history this is not. It's fascinating, largely because of Beard's skill at making such thick stuff readable, but for a casual reader who keyed in on the title and expected hilarity, it's a bit of a disappointment.

2016 read #29: SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard.

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard
538 pages
Published 2015
Read from April 6 to April 12
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Now this is how to do a history tome. Beard has been recommended to me in the past, and I must say I am thoroughly impressed by her mix of hard-nosed skepticism, dry humor, and colorful character detail, as well as her resistance to the Big Person trap that certain other historians (cough, Susan Wise Bauer, cough) slide into. It's refreshing to see a historian simultaneously seeking out the almost-lost voices of common folk, delighting in barroom jokes painted in Pompeii and the modest gravestone brags of successful laundrymen, while minimizing the personal impact of any given emperor's foibles.

I particularly admired Beard's approach to handling the "truth" behind the myths (such as Romulus and Remus, or the ancient Roman kings, or various heroes of the early Republic). In perfect contrast to Bauer, who insisted on some nugget of fact inspiring even the most outlandish ancient myth, Beard is interested, sensibly, in what the telling of these myths might suggest about the concerns, worldview, and hidden anxieties of contemporary people. Throughout, Beard retains her healthy skepticism while demonstrating a thorough expertise in her subject matter -- all with a dexterous and appealing command of prose, a rare combination of historical expert and polished author. This may be her magnum opus, but I'm eager to look into her other books.

2016 read #25: Thames: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd.

Thames: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd
441 pages
Published 2007
Read from February 23 to March 29
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

At some point I must have mentioned how Ackroyd's London: The Biography was my favorite book that I've never finished. I read about a third of that tome, dazzled and entranced by Ackroyd's signature non-fiction style, a mix of anecdote, legend, trivia, and delightful digression. The density of that style, however, gummed down my attention span; London, even more so than Ackroyd's other historical surveys, is meant for sampling, for after-dinner perusal, a chapter here or there, not so much for consecutive reading. Thames, unsurprisingly, is more of the same, directed by the flow of the titular river rather than the metropolis, but otherwise practically a continuation of the first volume. Along with Albion, London and Thames form a sort of conceptual trilogy or protracted thesis statement, adumbrating on Ackroyd's lifelong theme of genius loci, the connection between place and person, the recurrence of certain events or motifs in particular locations, a persistence of taste or temper or ritual from the Roman or Saxon ages down to the present.

Sometimes, the connections he traces can be a bit of a stretch. Seemingly every few paragraphs, Thames works in some variant on "Perhaps this is the ancient spirit of the river?" or "This might hold the key to much earlier phases of life beside the Thames." Most likely this would not seem so repetitive had I followed a more leisurely, à la carte reading schedule -- or perhaps it would, no matter what, considering that I deliberately took my time with this book, having learned my lesson from London. Some chapters caught my imagination more than others: the various categories of employment along the London riverfront and docks, for instance, were fascinating, certainly more so (to my taste) than the dry list of churches within the vicinity of the river's course. All in all, Thames was a lovely and absorbing read, even if it isn't as inspired a ramble as (what I managed to read of) London.

2014 read #77: The History of the Renaissance World by Susan Wise Bauer.

The History of the Renaissance World: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Conquest of Constantinople by Susan Wise Bauer
686 pages
Published 2013
Read from July 31 to August 12
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

Continuing the now-inevitable pattern of Bauer's histories, this third (and presumably final) installment heaps up lists of names of kings, popes, and battles while neglecting the rather more important (if less glamorous) processes of social, technological, and ideological change. Despite the title, the rediscovery of Aristotlean logic, after a brief scene-setting summary at the beginning, receives scarcely any mention; the wider currents of thought and culture resulting from the translation movement, or the technological and mathematical heritage of the early Muslim world, or the technological innovations of the Chinese sphere, get at best spotty treatment, appearing in scattered paragraphs and one-sentence asides, if mentioned at all. Gunpowder, for example, materializes only in Bauer's description of battles, slowly making its way out of China into Viet lands, the Central Asian khanates, the Ottoman empire, and finally Western Europe.

Nonetheless, as with Bauer's History of the Medieval World, the wealth of anecdotal detail around historical figures and foibles is so damn entertaining, it's hard to dismiss this book out of hand. The chapter on the Black Death, while brief, is superbly well-done. The sections on Raziyya, female Sultan of Delhi, and Abubakari II, king of Mali and early explorer of the open Atlantic, among others, introduced me to people and events I'd never known of, and now I want to learn everything about them that I can.

Bauer's History of the World, then, is like a bulky, semi-portable Wikipedia of history -- a taste of knowledge that serves as an entertaining starting point, but often frustrates the desire for deeper understanding.

2014 read #59: The History of the Ancient World by Susan Wise Bauer.

The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome by Susan Wise Bauer
782 pages
Published 2007
Read from June 1 to June 28
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

A year ago I read the sequel to this book, The History of the Medieval World, and even though it was the usually tedious sort of "kings and wars" history that eschews analysis of social trends and the experiences of anyone who lacks "Emperor" before their name, I found myself impressed by the breadth of Bauer's coverage. A kings and wars history, yes, but one that dug its way into Korea and medieval Japan and other cultural areas usually ignored by such histories. This was enough to get me to shell out some $30 for my own copy of this volume, and imagine having the whole three-volume set ready to hand in my future library.

I've only now gotten around to reading this installment. (My reading pace has slowed considerably from last year, and 800-page history tomes don't ease their way into my rotation quite like they did.) While I'm not entirely discouraged from (eventually) reading The History of the Renaissance World, this book was a let-down. Sniffing about the lack of known personalities in social history and archaeology, Bauer insists upon kings and wars almost to the exclusion of all else; the charming or bloodthirsty or charmingly bloodthirsty anecdotes sprinkled through the later volume are thin on the ground here, while the first half or so of Ancient World relies to a disconcerting degree on legends and holy texts, often stripped down to their barest outline but otherwise presented with little correction.

Worst of all, thanks to Bauer's disdain for mere archaeology, the fascinating scope of her World is restricted to the usual suspects: Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, a tiny bit of India, a lot of Greece, and a whole lot of Rome, following the long-outmoded "ladder" of civilizations (with modern Western Europe, as a general rule, found on top). Once the Punic Wars begin, Bauer seems to shrug off the existence of any part of the world outside Rome and China: addressing Pontius or Parthia or India only in reference to movements from those two centers, skipping centuries of amply documented history in Egypt and Greece, presumably because they'd passed on the torch and weren't so relevant to the glorious path of progress. It's an ethnocentric approach at odds with the title and with the subsequent volume.

The only help for it, though, would be to add something like another 700 pages and producing a separate volume in the series, A History of the Classical World or some such. Presumably an editor or publisher (or a fit of pragmatism) nixed that possibility. What we're left with in that absence, though, is a tremendous amount of material sped through with little to hold one's interest, undeserving of the title of a "world" history.

2014 read #39: The Future Eaters by Tim Flannery.

The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People by Tim Flannery
407 pages
Published 1994
Read from April 28 to April 30
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

One would never guess from the current pitiful state of popular science, but the past two or three decades have been an extraordinary golden age of scientific discovery, theory, and interpretation. Every field from physics to biology to paleontology to archaeology has exploded with new approaches and new raw data, vastly building upon or wholly overturning old concepts and understandings. If there weren't so much else to worry about in the world (staggering economic inequality, social apathy and stagnation, regression from egalitarian aspirations, the decay of democratic institutions, the reemergence of all-powerful oligarchies, loss of interest in real sustainability in favor of fashionable sops to status and suburban ego), it would be a great time to be alive, if only because we're finding out so goddamn much about the universe and our beautiful, life-filled little pocket of it.

Which makes reading 20 year old science books a little bit like blowing the soil off the lid of a time capsule. The speculations are so quaint, the optimism so... depressing. For the casual-yet-engaged reader, there's also the awareness that practically any information in a book like this could well be superseded by more recent research or reinterpretation.

Much of this book's human ecology talk is drawn wholesale from Guns, Germs, and Steel, with Flannery adding grand speculations of his own, built upon if-we-assumes and then-logically-it-musts and an overriding belief in reductionist interpretations of behavior. More interesting to me are Flannery's accounts of primordial biogeography in Australasia and the various reconstructed effects of human incursion, but even those chapters left me wondering whether reanalysis or new archaeological sites might have obsoleted all the information he presents. I dreaded Flannery's windup for the inevitable "What can we do now to create a sustainable future for these lands?" pitch, knowing nothing at all of any substance had been done before all pretense of informed democracy had died over the last two decades.

I found myself wishing for an updated, fully revised tome addressing much the same information, but alas, the '90s were a more hospitable age for such publications. It's unlikely anything like this would get published in today's dismal popular science climate.

2013 read #124: The First Frontier by Scott Weidensaul.

The First Frontier: The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery, & Endurance in Early America by Scott Weidensaul
400 pages
Published 2012
Read from September 24 to September 26
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

I think I've mentioned before how I prefer the older end of history. I think World War I is far more interesting than World War II. The late Middle Ages don't interest me nearly as much as the early Middle Ages. I prefer the Greeks to the Romans. My favorite temple site is Göbekli Tepe. Naturally, my favorite period in American-European interaction begins with Skraelings and Vikings and ends with the Seven Years War, when celebrity names like George Washington and Ben Franklin begin to appear. I was immediately sold on the description of The First Frontier: "Here is the older, wilder, darker history of a time when the land between the Atlantic and the Appalachians was contested ground."

Weidensaul's writing is engaging in the mold of experiential, interpretive history, beginning chapters with in media res point-of-view descriptions, a gimmick that oversteps the known facts of encounter to create a more vivid impression on the reader. I'm not sure how I feel about that, especially the part about going beyond the facts; a similar gimmick animates Steven Mithen's excellent After the Ice, but where Mithen takes care to separate his interpretive fiction from the actual finds of archaeology, you wouldn't know what's fact and what's extrapolation in Weidensaul's account unless you made careful study of the end notes. Which is unfortunate, given how little is actually known of contact period native cultures and early encounters, and how much room for interpretation there is within the limited sources. (Weidensaul presents as fact the idea that Basque fishers and whalers, and other seaborne entrepreneurs of western Europe, were in contact with the people of the eastern American seaboard for "centuries" before any official European explorers arrived, which, while plausible, was still conjecture last time I checked.) It's clear Weidensaul did his research, retrieving loads of interesting factoids from various records and garbled accounts, but at this point I think I would like a huge tome filled with primary sources, with only minimal glossing to provide context and possible interpretations of events.

2013 read #121: Old Man River by Paul Schneider.

Old Man River: The Mississippi River in North American History by Paul Schneider
334 pages
Published 2013
Read from September 18 to September 19
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

The subtitle, I think, fudges the truth a bit. The Mississippi itself would seem ample subject for a popular history such as this, but Old Man River overtops its banks and pulls the entire Mississippi watershed within its purview, from the dubiously dated habitation of the Meadowcroft Shelter in Pennsylvania to the Deepwater Horizon incident, from Clovis sites at the headwaters of the Cimarron to an extended interlude among the Iroquois and Huron in future New York and Ontario. A better subtitle might be "Selected Incidents and Anecdotes from the Middle Half of the Continental United States." Not content with the scope of that subject matter, Schneider inserts tales of his own kayak-and-taxicab excursions throughout the drainage basin. Schneider's prose is journalistic, a fast read but hardly poetic. The likes of Rebecca Solnit, Edward Abbey, and Ellen Meloy have spoiled me; Schneider's excursions seem pedestrian, banal, contrived, lacking the shades of meaning and insight found in better travel writing, touristy even -- altogether pointless against the backdrop of exploration and genocide that he breezes through. (The sad litany of colonial wars against native nations, told with such heartbreaking intensity throughout Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, gets compressed here into a literal bullet-list, a mere two pages long.)

On the whole, though, Old Man River is enjoyable, if undemanding. When not briskly summarized, the chapters of actual history are absorbing, reviving my dormant interest in early American history. Picking through the bibliography yielded several titles I want to look into as soon as my current library backlog (a box of thirteen more books, which I keep resupplying faster than I consume) is down to a more manageable stock.

2013 read #113: The Classical World by Robin Lane Fox.

The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian by Robin Lane Fox
581 pages
Published 2006
Read from August 1 to August 28
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

In the back of this book I still keep its receipt. (My whole adult life I've tended to use receipts as handy bookmarks.) Together with The Muslim Discovery of Europe and a typo-riddled history of the Mongols, I bought The Classical World in paperback on January 16, 2010 from the Borders store that used to be by the mall. It was the last of my major book "splurges," the financially reckless buying sprees that had loaded my bookcases and trimmed down my bank balances since my ancient army days. In the glory days, I would spend $150 or more on books any time I stepped into a Borders or a Barnes & Noble, stockpiling titles that, all too often, I never actually got around to reading. The last time we moved, I must have gotten rid of at least a hundred pounds of books, most of them unread. The same impulse operates, albeit rather more frugally, every time I step into a library.

So I've had The Ancient World on my hands for over three and a half years. By my standards that isn't a particularly long waiting period; I still have to read The Mists of Avalon and Dhalgren, which I bought around the same time in early 2002. But I think keeping books around for such a long wait makes them that much more disappointing when they don't blow me away when I finally do read them. (I started reading The Mists of Avalon almost two months ago, and I'm barely a hundred pages in; at this point I doubt I'll bother to finish it this year.) The Ancient World is okay, but for far too much of its length it's a highly compressed "kings and wars" history, focused on a rather limited motif of "freedom," "justice," and "luxury" -- three concepts mostly reserved for the most privileged minorities in society, then and now. The breezy, abbreviated presentation can seem flippantly unconcerned with anyone who doesn't meet each culture's standards of freedom and justice: women and slaves in democratic Athens, pretty much anyone who isn't a rich aristocratic head of household in republican Rome. I'm reasonably certain this is an artifact of brevity rather than sympathy, but even so, I would expect better from such a recent book.

The Roman sections were rather more expansive, indulging in a few slice-of-life chapters. I also learned quite a bit, even in this compressed form, about the days of republican Rome. For one thing, the name of today's Cato Institute is hilariously apt, given the Catos' destruction of even modest legislative gains for the lower classes, and their overriding drive to keep the senatorial class's privileges and freedoms intact at everyone else's expense.

2013 read #109: When Asia Was the World by Stewart Gordon.

When Asia Was the World: Traveling Merchants, Scholars, Warriors, and Monks Who Created the "Riches of the East" by Stewart Gordon
193 pages
Published 2008
Read August 21
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

International travel narratives in the medieval world are one of my super-specific historical interests. The Silk Road-Indian Ocean trading sphere during that same time period is another. This book samples a bit of both; if it were longer and lingered in fuller detail, if it provided more historical context and went into long asides to flesh out the lands and cultures along the way, I would have no reason not to love it with all my heart. Alas, Gordon adopts a brisk tone and breezes through a mere nine narratives of travel, alluding to but otherwise ignoring tantalizing other narratives and documents I certainly would like to see explored. The nine stories are selected with an eye to a broad diversity of experiences and perspectives, which somewhat ameliorates the lack of depth. Overall this feels like a morsel when I wanted a feast.

2013 read #108: Ancient China: From Beginnings to the Empire by Jacques Gernet.

Ancient China: From Beginnings to the Empire by Jacques Gernet
Translated by Raymond Rudorff
135 pages
Published 1964; English translation published 1968
Read from August 19 to August 20
Rating: ★★ out of 5

Okay, so I only checked out this book because a) I'm running out of history texts I want to read, and b) I can't seem to find any good Chinese history books that focus on the interesting stuff. Every Chinese history book at my library is about Mao or the Long March or "the making of modern China." Boring, boring, boring. At least the time frame of this little book matches what I would consider more interesting.

Note those publication dates, though. We can't stop here; this is processualist country. If you don't know, processualism was a school of archaeological thought priggishly focused on reductive, materialist explanations and a rather tiresome insistence on rational actors and logical positivism. Don't get me wrong, my professional inclinations still lean toward material factors; the mutual interrelationships of humans and ecology interest me a great deal. If I ever got back into archaeology on a professional, publishing basis, my research questions would draw almost entirely from how human groups and animal populations affected one another in prehistory, and my approaches would be dense with graphs and statistics. But positivist archaeology, and rational actor theory and reductive explanations, are freaking ridiculous. Humans are never rational, and fitting human behavior onto simple cause and effect arrows is hopeless.

This book was a surreal experience after years of reading more postmodern and human-scale histories. I haven't read anything this aggressively reductive since, well, archaeological theory class, when we did our two weeks of processualists. The text is riddled with sweeping causal statements like "From the very beginning, the discovery of alloys must have led to a specialization of [social] functions." "Must have," "doubtless," "many proofs show" -- such definitive statements far outnumber more qualified assertions, even when the claim is based solely on armchair reasoning.

Outmoded theoretical grounds aside, I found myself profoundly disappointed by the lack of substantive supporting information throughout this book -- you know, the stuff that actually makes history interesting. For sheer terseness, this volume even beats that Byzantium book I found so disappointing earlier this year. At least that book named some major figures. Of course, this time period is almost entirely legendary in later Chinese writing, but it would be nice if Gernet had bothered to supply evidence or bases for his reductive conclusions, without endnotes referring back to primary sources in French. As it is, I feel I barely learned anything from this book, which is the true shame of it.