2026 read #33: Between Two Rivers by Moudhy Al-Rashid.

Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History by Moudhy Al-Rashid

262 pages

Published 2025

Read from June 15 to June 26

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

After being stuck for over a month reading my last book, I wanted to kickstart my reading again with a lightweight nonfiction piece. This book promised to be just that, a breezy look at Mesopotamian history told from the lens of artifacts associated with the supposed “museum” of Ennigaldi-Nanni in Ur. It aspires to be a history of how ancient people thought about history, but does it really do more than gesture in that direction?

Between Two Rivers is the platonic ideal of a 2020s nonfiction book: large type, cheaply printed, no illustrations, written by a specialist academic for, shall we say, a non-specialist audience. As so many contemporary writers do, Al-Rashid simplifies topics to the point of condescension. She repeatedly describes personal cylinder seals as ancient “Instagram bios” (as if making the comparison once wasn’t enough). She contextualizes pottery as “the Tupperware, [and] Amazon packaging… of the ancient world,” as if even a 2020s reader doesn’t know what pottery is.

It’s a shame, because the range of topics here is fascinating. Al-Rashid’s academic specialty is the history of ancient science; I would much rather have read a tome dedicated exclusively to that than baby’s first introduction to Mesopotamia. But that’s not what sells, apparently, so that isn’t what gets published, at least not in the sort of mainstream history you’re likely to find in a small library system.

But does Rivers manage to be something of a history of history? Well… maybe a little bit, in the opening and closing chapters. For the most part, though, Al-Rashid just goes through the usual pop history motions, and Rivers suffers as a result. It’s no Weavers, Scribes, and Kings.

2026 read #22: The Far Edges of the Known World by Owen Rees.

The Far Edges of the Known World: Life Beyond the Borders of Ancient Civilizations by Owen Rees

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.

2025 read #86: The Roads to Rome by Catherine Fletcher.

The Roads to Rome: A History of Imperial Expansion by Catherine Fletcher

311 pages

Published 2024

Read from November 10 to November 17

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

We always have to step carefully around histories of Rome. As with histories of war, the topic tends to attract cryptofascists and bootlickers, glassy-eyed in their praise of power and empire and masculine control. Which is a shame; Rome lay at the center of a fascinating era, a period of cultural interchange and population movement. But no, so many histories want to grovel at the feet of the caesars.

This book is a history of Roman roads, utilizing them as a means of examining imperialism and structures of power throughout Europe and the Mediterranean. Fletcher breezes through the Classical Roman section of her history within 60 pages. The bulk of Roads is about how successive cultural moments engaged with (and mythologized) the memory and infrastructure of Rome. We wend through the medieval age of pilgrimage, the early modern Grand Tour, the encroachment of railroads, the imperialist myth-making of Fascism, and the romanticizing sheen of Hollywood and all-inclusive continental vacations.

Along the way, we sometimes get bogged down in recitations of politicians and authors who traveled a road, or who purposefully avoided a road. Fletcher interweaves her sources with her own post-lockdown travels across Europe and Asia Minor. Her contemporary journeys are enjoyably written, seasoned with an academic’s wariness of our decade’s resurgent national populism. Both the historic and modern narratives would have been enhanced with more maps, but publishers are cheap about illustrations these days.

One thing from Roads that will forever stick with me: the understanding that the “Great Man” style of history was “part of a wider European trend of history in service of the modern nation state,” crafting a narrative of national heroes and their patriotic deeds. It’s one of those observations that’s blatant in hindsight, but that our culture doesn’t tend to acknowledge.

2025 read #84: Kindred by Rebecca Wragg Sykes.

Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes

Illustrated by Alison Atkin and Marc Dando

390 pages

Published 2020

Read from November 5 to November 10

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

When I got my BA in Anthropology, way back in the late ’00s, the consensus on Neanderthals was that they were an over-specialized branch of hominin evolution, hyper-carnivores eking a meager living on the edge of the habitable world, oddly stagnant in culture across deep reaches of time, dead without descendants. They may have buried their dead, took care of their disabled cohorts, and utilized mineral pigments, but otherwise seemed to demonstrate no conception of art. It was deemed unlikely that they could make complex and varied vocal sounds. Neanderthals were depicted as a tragic curiosity, offering insight into adaptation and extinction—fellow travelers crowded out by our own species or starved by the loss of habitat.

The beautiful thing about science is that we’re always learning more, and adapting what we think we know to adjust to new information. Thanks to genetic sequencing, we know H. sapiens interbred with Neanderthals (and other related populations). We’ve found evidence of rudimentary sculpture and even construction. Neanderthals lived in and adapted to a broad diversity of environments. They also seem to have engaged in some measure of cannibalism as mortuary ritual. It’s a more nuanced picture by far.

Of course, the very dynamism of science means that this book, a mere five years out of date, might not be worth reading for all I know. Still, Kindred is one of the few science books in my library, and five years out of date is better than my education, which is approaching twenty years old.

Sykes, like so many scientists turned pop-sci writers before her, produces a readable but often uninspired text that feels like she tried too hard to keep her wording casual. It’s a style choice that strikes me as condescending. Each chapter begins with a sensory immersion sequence in italics, which can sometimes still be fun, but here just feels awkward. She also tries to slip in the occasional poetic flourish, which falls flat more often than not.

That said, I love science, I miss studying human evolution and prehistory, and this book is a perfectly adequate refresher. Once it gets past the de rigueur background information, Kindred offers fascinating and detailed looks at everything from Neanderthals’ health and injuries, to granular examinations of the climates and environments they experienced, to extensive inventories of their varied foodways. From there, it sketches more speculative pictures of Neanderthal aesthetics and emotions. It’s a solid pop primer, so far as I can tell with my outdated background. It also offers a gratifying amount of depth that these treatments rarely provide.

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.