Alexander to Actium

by on March 21, 2015 at 6:48 pm
Posted In: Books

I’ve long been interested in the ancient world. The Roman Empire, especially, gets a lot of my historical interest. In my reading, it’s very easy to find books on Rome (Empire and Republic), and on Alexander. The period right after Alexander is a bit more difficult. So I’ve been searching for a good book on the diadochoi and the successor states in general for quite some time.

Peter Green’s Alexander to Actium is that book. Green is a professor of Classics who needed a textbook on the Hellenistic world for a set of lectures, and found that no appropriate work existed (which explains my troubles). It is a history of the entire Hellenistic world from the death of Alexander to (to spoil his alliteration) the death of Cleopatra. He wrote it with both the specialists and more general audience in mind, “The main text throughout remains free (I hope) of all arcane allusions, historiographical jargon, specialist shorthand, and quotations—familiar commonplaces apart—in foreign languages.” He is much more successful with the earlier parts of the list than the later parts. There is a fair amount of academic French scattered throughout the book that is opaque to me.

The book itself is broken into five parts, roughly delineating different periods of Hellenistic history, and for the most part chapters of ‘straight’ history are alternated with examinations of particular subjects such as art, architecture, medicine, science (or the lack thereof), and philosophy. Philosophy in particular gets two chapters in part five, and proved hard for me to get through, as opposed to the rest of the book, which was (a few phrases apart) a very interesting read.

I should mention that it is a very long read as well. Nearly three hundred years of an area stretching from Greece to India (at its greatest extent) is a lot of territory, and this is not a beginning summary, but a full, detailed overview of the entire subject. Despite the size of the book, and the amount of detail that is in the book, it does not hold your hand. It starts with Alexander dead, and plunges directly into Macedonian/Greek power politics with no real guide to who these people are. This holds true, though to much lesser extent in other places as well. Thankfully, this wasn’t a major problem for me, but I sure could have used a dramatis personae going in.

In all, this really is the book I’ve been looking for for over a decade. History, culture, thought, of a period I wanted to know more about, all well told in a single package, and a great place to go back to for reference, and to tie any greater detail I find back into the whole. Highly recommended to anyone with an interest in the period.

└ Tags: , , ,
1 Comment

Rob Roy

by on February 28, 2015 at 9:20 am
Posted In: Books

Well, this was a little different. There’s a set of introductions to the book that, between them, take up well over 50 pages. The main one (by the author) gives a short history of clan MacGregor, and explains the long-term problems they have had with the law. This then turns into a history of the actual person, Rob Roy. This would have been fine, but was over-long, not that well written, and of course, I wanted to get to the actual story.

The other introduction is from the publisher (of the 1893 edition) describing the writing of the novel. It is much shorter, and has some interesting points. An important one is that Rob Roy is not about Rob Roy. Sir Walter Scott in fact resisted the title for that very reason, but he was a popular enough figure that as soon as he was in the story, it was what everyone wanted to know about.

My copy of the book is a cheap (I got it for free) Kindle ebook from Waxkeep publishing. Unlike some other cheap ebooks, this one was in pretty good shape. All the footnotes merely appeared at the end of the paragraph they occurred in, and there’s a few ‘L’s instead of ‘£’s, but is mostly free of problems.

The book itself was a disappointment. It was by no means bad, but I found it nowhere near as engaging as Ivanhoe. The main character is Francis Osbaldingstone, a young man enamored of France, and poetry and creative endeavors. His father is a colorless businessman in London, estranged from the rest of his large Scottish family, and wants his son to take over the business. When his son refuses, Francis is exiled to his relatives with instructions to pick one out as the heir to the business.

Things get complicated from there, with fellow travelers on the road north, his uncle and cousins, a romantic interest… and then things go a bit sideways with trouble with his father’s business, sending him into Scotland and a new cast of characters. This new cast of course prominently features Rob Roy himself, but also the Scottish countryside.

The structure of the plot is sound; everything in the novel rests on other elements, even when it seems like a digression. In fact, the least essential thing in the book could well be the main character. His presence kicks off much of the action, but the vast bulk of the book is him being acted upon instead of acting. Add to this the fact that there’s a fair amount of dialog in various Scots accents, and the book is a slow read. (I found the heavier accents easier going for some reason.)

So, I can’t really recommend Rob Roy, even though I did generally enjoy it. If you do generally like 19th Century writing, I do recommend it.

└ Tags: , ,
1 Comment

Elizabeth I

by on January 11, 2015 at 10:34 pm
Posted In: Books

The Life of Elizabeth I by Alison Weir, is more ‘the reign of Elizabeth I’, in that it only gives the bare essentials of background before starting with when succeeds to the throne of England at the age of 25. However, Weir has covered the earlier parts of her live in other books, so there isn’t much reason to go into it here.

Past that, it is a biography, and good one too. Weir takes us on a tour of Elizabeth’s life, and talks about her court, her politics, her intrigues, her courting…. Weir usually takes time out to discuss the general conditions of life in the era she’s writing about, but this happens a little unexpectedly in two chapters in the middle of the book, instead of setting the scene at the beginning. There’s a lot of talk about her court, and the people who populate it, and discussions of many of the stories that grew up around her reign. Generally what you expect from a good biography, and handled very well.

In all, a good, entertaining book, and worth a read to anyone interested in Elizabeth I or the Elizabethan era in general.

└ Tags: , ,
1 Comment

Time and Again

by on November 21, 2014 at 12:22 pm
Posted In: Books

Both of my parents read, but they generally read different things. So, when both of them are recommending a book, it’s time to take note. Despite that, I just never could get myself around to trying the copy of Time and Again on my dad’s shelf. I’m not entirely sure why, I know I told myself a few times that I really should get around to it, but I never did.

Well, recently the Kindle edition went on sale, so I bought that and read it, decades late. I had not realized it was an ‘illustrated novel’, and had some trepidation as I started reading it with pages and pages of pure text going by, but indeed, all the illustrations and photographs are there and in good shape, if perhaps a bit small on the screen, so no concerns there. Sadly, there are some glitches in the text, which get more common late in the book; more importantly, the Elevated Railway, “the El”, gets rendered as both “the El” and “the EI” throughout the entire book (if you happen to be encountering this in a sanserif font, that’s ‘ee-el’ and ‘ee-aye’), and obviously missed the proofing entirely.

Time and Again is a time-travel story, and needs a little bit of time travel itself today. It was originally published in 1970, and does show that we’ve come a ways in the last 44 years (poof! another hundred grey furs). The attitude to women in the workplace has gotten better, and of course there’s nary a computer to be seen at the beginning in a job that has gone all digital today. The concerns about the world have moved on a bit, and while there’s a fair amount of suspicion about just what a secret government project may get up to, it’s not axiomatic that it will be nothing good, either.

Time and Again is a celebration of New York City, and Jack Finney spends a lot of time bringing it to life in its pages. More to the point, he spends a lot of time bringing the New York of 1882 to life. Both the New York of 1970 and 1882 are there, but of course, the 1882 version needs a lot more work to understand. Time travel in this story involves… ‘letting go’ of everything you know about what makes today today, and filling yourself with the world of where you’re going to. This book is of course a few hundred page exercise in doing exactly that.

At any rate, it is successful on that level, and tells a good story while it is at it. Much of the middle of the book is more of a travelogue in the tradition of the past is a foreign country, and the enthusiasm carries the book out of a somewhat slow start. At the end, it falters again as poorly handled moralizing comes to the fore for about a chapter. Finney (through his main character) is too harsh on the world of 1970; even while he notes the very real problems of 1882, he misses the fact that they were every bit as bad or catastrophic from their point of view as the problems of 1970 are for him. Thankfully, the travelogue and a mystery are the real focal points of the book, and they are served well.

└ Tags: , ,
1 Comment

The Wars of the Roses

by on October 29, 2014 at 7:58 pm
Posted In: Books

The Wars of the Roses is the second book by Alison Weir I’ve read, and it definitely tells me there’s no need to stop here. The writing is good, and gives a great overview of what is a legendarily confusing period of English history. This actually a successor/prequel book to her early book, The Princes in the Tower, which is about the final act of the Wars of the Roses; the contest between Richard III and Henry VII (née Tudor), and the fate of the children of Edward IV.

Therefore, this book is actually about the rest. Starting with the deposition of Richard II, Weir spends quite some time of the shaky political footing of the Lancastrian Henry IV, and the successful Henry V, before moving on to the reign of Henry VI, and the large number of political problems that led to the Lancastrian-Yorkish struggle that forms the bulk of the Wars of the Roses, and ends with Tewksbury and the death Henry VI. The book is about evenly split by length between the lead up, and then the multiple armed crises.

There are a lot of names that fly by, and several people change names (titles) during the course of events, and despite efforts, Weir does not entirely clear up the confusion that results. I think this is a subject that really needs a dramatis personae to refer to. Geneological charts are provided, but were stuck in the very back of the Kindle edition I read, with a link to a web page with a larger reproduction, so I didn’t know of it until I was finished.

Another problem is that while she establishes the state of 15th-century England well at the beginning, and talks about how little disruption of life actually resulted from the wars at the end, this isn’t really mentioned during the bulk of the book, forcing one to perhaps have to correct some opinions after the fact.

Still, in all I did enjoy it and found it informative and recommend it. The main niggling worry I have is that since The Princes in the Tower was her first book, it may not be as good a companion to this as might be wished.

└ Tags: , , ,
1 Comment