Review: Persian Fire

Last night, about midnight, I was exhausted, but I only had 50 pages left in Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West and I could not allow myself to go to sleep until I finished it.

Overall, I thought this book was great. Holland has a very eloquent writing style (one of my few complaints is that in some spots it was almost too eloquent), and a knack for portraying people and events so vividly as to draw them through the centuries to the here and now and make them live again. He does a wonderful job of illustrating the complexity of the motivations of the major players on both the Greek and Persian sides of the conflict, and does an equally great job of placing all events within a solid framework of cultural and political context. Indeed, I gained a depth of understanding of Persian, Spartan, and Athenian social and cultural development that none of my history classes have ever given me. And perhaps most importantly, the work read less like a dry history textbook and more like a great historical epic. All of the great information in the world means nothing if it's so horribly boring that no one can wade through the book, but this was assuredly not the case with Persian Fire.

As I mentioned before, I have few complaints about the book. There were a few moments, typically when introducing a new point, where Holland seemed to wander off into tangents. He generally seemed to be attempting to introduce his point by way of some analogy, but on more than one occasion the attempt seemed a bit forced and clumsy. In addition, the last 15-20 pages of the book were a bit difficult to get through; they contained such an abrupt, hasty, and anticlimactic summary of postwar events that I almost felt as though Holland had gotten to the end of his material and was at a loss for how to wrap the thing up. While somewhat puzzling, neither of these faults was enough to materially damage my opinion of the book as a whole. A very worthwhile read.