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.

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.

Review: A History of Pagan Europe

Moving right along in my autumn reading spree, I just finished A History of Pagan Europe by Prudence Jones & Nigel Pennick.

I'm going to start right off with the book's major weakness: Because so many centuries and so much territory was crammed into a relatively short volume, the text had a tendency to degenerate into a list of dates and events. Also, for the same reasons, the book was able to do little more than summarize traditions and pantheons, without giving more depth to cultural context. In addition, some of the illustrations were downright irrelevant. Their captions offered little information, and many of them were never even mentioned in the main body of the text, so they served no purpose.

On the other hand, the book had a few notable strengths. For one thing, this history of paganism was not offered through the lens of a Christian bias, yet doesn't seem to project modern Neo-Pagan concepts on ancient traditions. This is remarkably refreshing. Also, the book addresses more than simply classical Greek and Roman practices and Celtic practices. I found the second half of the book much more interesting than the first half because of its glimpses into societies and traditions that aren't covered ad nauseam elsewhere. Another virtue of the text is that, unlike many Christian-biased histories, it does not portray the displacement of official paganism by official Christianity as a simple clear-cut event; rather, the sometimes lengthy persistence of many folk practices through time is given proper acknowledgement (without being unduly portrayed as the continuance of a formal pagan priesthood through the ages). Lastly, the book illustrates the roots of some not-so-obvious remnants of folk religion in modern culture.

All-in-all, I would recommend this book as a basic overview for readers who have not already engaged in any in-depth study of pre-Christian religion in Europe. If you're pretty grounded in Celtic or classical Greco-Roman culture, the latter half of the book still has value for you as it addresses Germanic and Slavic religion and the interaction of those cultures with the better-known Celtic and Greco-Roman traditions.

Review: The Fossil Trail

I went on a birthday book-buying binge (oooh, alliteration!), so I expect to be writing up a few book reviews in the near future. The first one is now!

I just finished The Fossil Trail: How We Know What We Think We Know About Human Evolution by Ian Tattersall, who is currently with the American Museum of Natural History. It's the revised edition of a book first released in 1995. I would rate the reading as being on the level of a college-level introductory paleoanthropology course. Having never done any previous reading on the subject matter before, I still found Tattersall's explanations relatively easy to follow.

One thing I noticed throughout the book is that it is rife with typos. The book otherwise seemed to be of pretty decent quality, but the missing letters and duplicate letters ran rampant throughout the book, and it got pretty irritating after a while. Tattersall also seemed to have a bit of trouble organizing his material, with a large number of instances of "more on that later," but that could simply be due to the complexity of subject matter being squeezed into one volume. It can also be difficult to keep up with the large number of fossil specimens specifically dealt with in the text. The additional chapters added for the second edition, though, did a pretty good job of bringing the text up to speed with current developments in the field, and I thought Tattersall's treatment of the subject matter was pretty enlightening and thought-provoking.

Some thoughts this book brought to mind:

1) I hadn't truly realized how young the science of paleoanthropology is, nor how arbitrary species classification is. Really, when I began to comprehend how much uncertainty riddles the field, I almost began to have some idea of how there are people in the world who can still militantly oppose the idea of evolution. I say "almost," because with some of those people, I'm pretty sure that even if there were no uncertainty in the field, they would be just as militant in their objections anyway.

2) The book addresses the fact that species classification is only possible because of gaps in the fossil record, which reminds me of an article I read some time ago that discussed offspring always being the same species as the parents... so presumably, if there were no gaps in the fossil record, there would theoretically only be one species from us all the way back to our point of origin. The same would be true of every other species on the planet. Then, theoretically, by this reasoning, if we all descended from some common single-celled organism, we would all have to be classified as the same species. That possibility puts me in mind of the Native American "all my relations" concept of all living things being our brethren. It was a profound moment in my reading. I had to sit the book down and process that idea for a minute before I went on. That one train of thought alone made it worthwhile for me to pick up this book on impulse off the table at Half Price Books.

Overall, I really enjoyed this read, and would recommend it to anyone who gets into science, anthropology, human evolution, and the like. I would particularly recommend it to folks who are interested in those topics but don't have a previous background in studying those topics. If you've studied the subject matter already, this overview of the development of the field of paleoanthropology may be a bit too basic for you.

Mists of Avalon Sucks... Or Does It?

So, after many years of other people talking about how much they just loooove The Mists of Avalon, I finally picked up a copy at Half Price Books last year. I had never felt the slightest urge to read it before, but after reading Stephen R. Lawhead's Pendragon Cycle over the winter of 2009, I found myself wanting to compare and contrast how the authors had chosen to weave the mythology together. So. Cheap copy of "Mists" procured, I settled in for what I expected to be an epic read.

Except that it sort of sucked.

1) The character development seemed half-assed. The behavior and motivations of the characters wouldn't always follow from circumstances, or would seem contrived.

2) The pacing... dear god, the pacing. I've noticed that this tends to be a problem in stories that cover decades and decades in a single volume, but the last 150 pages of this book just dragged. By the time I got through them, I felt like the story had ended ages ago and Bradley had just kept rambling for the heck of it.

3) There were some chronological inconsistencies that kept my brow furrowed through much of the book. I felt like Bradley had gotten confused by the length and complexity of her own story and couldn't get it worked out in the editing process. I really don't think she had any clear idea of her own timeline.

4) Much of the dialogue seemed to make no point, and do nothing to further the plot. It was as if it was there just to be there.

Anyway, by the end of the book, I couldn't wait to sell it back to Half Price Books and forget this whole incident ever happened. I left it at that for another year. But one day, I will become self-aware enough to know that if I start a series, I can't be satisfied until I've read the whole thing. So, library card in hand, I came back for more.

The Forest House was tolerable; the underlying story was good but the relatively shallow, unrealistic character development got me again. And I almost could not manage to force my way through Lady of Avalon. It took me eight weeks to read the book. I didn't think I could continue with this series. I was sure I had to quit. And then I found out something I hadn't been aware of before... Marion Zimmer Bradley died before the fourth volume was finished, and the book was completed by Diana L. Paxson.

And guess what? It was good. Paxson was able to do with Bradley's ideas what Bradley herself had not been able to do, which was to make a good story out of them. Paxson brings to the table all of the things Bradley lacked in writing style. Yes, I know there are some rabid Marion Zimmer Bradley fans out there, but as far as I can see, the woman was filled with great philosophical and metaphysical thoughts, but couldn't write worth a crap. Now that I'm into the volumes penned by Paxson instead, though, this series has taken on new life for me. I'm actually enjoying it. My advice to folks is to just skip the early volumes and start with Priestess of Avalon and go from there. While a couple of the books do overlap each other in timeline and characters, all of the stories stand alone. If you pick up "Mists" and find you can't stomach it, just skip ahead and read the good ones. If, on the other hand, Bradley's writing doesn't bother you... well, then, don't listen to me.