Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Review: Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome

Last night I finished Anthony Everitt's Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome. This is actually the second time I've read one of Everitt's books; the first time being several years back when I attempted to read Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician. I was hoping that giving Everitt a second chance would improve my opinion somewhat, but it didn't. The fact is, I find Everitt's writing to be phenomenally sloppy and boring, and I take issue with him as a scholar.

My most overwhelming beef with Everitt's work is that, at the end of the book (at least in the case of Hadrian; I never made it to the end of Cicero) I inexplicably feel as though the author's treatment of the subject has made the subject seem less important, rather than more important. Any good work of history or biography ought to be enlightening the reader as to the larger impact of the subject matter in the grand scheme of things. Everitt's premise did seem to be that he thinks Hadrian's reputation was given a raw deal by contemporaries, but none of the body of the work did much to back that idea up. In fact, by the end I felt more as though I supported Hadrian's detractors!

Everitt's inability to showcase his subject matter is certainly not my only complaint, however. The narrative in Hadrian, as in Cicero, reads like a vast collection of disjointed, loosely-related snippets. The writer is unable to transition smoothly between segments, leaving the reader feeling as if being jerked from point to point and topic to topic. In addition, many of the quotations used (presumably to support the author's points) seem to say nothing of any purpose at all. There are also many grammatically awkward moments throughout the book where one must read backward and forward a few sentences to figure out to whom some ambiguous pronoun refers. These factors come together to give the impression of careless, haphazard writing.

My final complaint against Everitt's work (again, in Hadrian as in Cicero) is what comes across as a lack of responsible scholarship. When real evidence is lacking, Everitt seems to enjoy giving way entirely to the realm of imagination, and then analyzing his guesses as if they are fact. He also has no qualms about questioning the reliability of a source and then in the next sentence basing his opinions on the very same questionable source material. When multiple rational hypotheses may be readily apparent, Everitt is content choosing one that may or may not even be the most plausible, and treating it as though it is reality.

I was sincerely hoping that I would go into Hadrian and formulate a completely different opinion than what I was left with from my time with Cicero, but sadly, that didn't happen. My previous opinions of Everitt's merit as a writer and historian were completely confirmed. I can say with relative confidence that I won't be venturing into this author's work again. His books seem to be relatively popular, so I wish I could give them more credit. Maybe other people see something in this guy that I just don't see (if you do, more power to you; I'm not judging and we don't need to argue about it). It's entirely possible, since I seem to be much more persnickety in my book choices than most of my acquaintances are. Personally, though, I just wish he would stop writing on subjects that I'm interested in, so that I would know that I wouldn't have any future temptations to torture myself with his work.

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

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.