Book Reviews

Japan is known for many different things, but one popular image associated with the country is that of the ‘samurai’. Especially, many people admire the idea of the ‘samurai spirit’ encapsulated in the concept of ‘bushido’ – the ‘way of the...

Hannibal: A Hellenistic Life is a biography of the famous Carthaginian leader Hannibal Barca, who lived between 247 and 188 BCE. Son of the brilliant general Hamilcar, who had taken part in the First Punic War (264-241 BCE), Hannibal inherited...

The story of the forty-seven samurai is a well-known tale not only in Japan but also around the world. There are many different versions but the plot always revolves around a group of warriors carrying out a vendetta in order to get revenge...

To argue whether the Vikings or Christopher Columbus was the first European to set foot in America is more of an argument of religious and heritage pride than archaeological evidence. In Norse America: The Story of a Founding Myth, Gordon...

In modern popular culture, the long war between science and religion is an exciting history of the Western civilization if not the whole world. Scientists battling priests or religious leaders over how the world was created dominate our perception...

Elodie Harper has once again produced a captivating historical fiction novel that takes you right into the streets and the homes of ancient Pompeii. Set in 75 CE, Pompeii is still a thriving Roman town, looked on by Venus Pompeiana, the patron...

River Kings, written by bioarchaeologist Cat Jarman (who is also a field archaeologist specialising in the Viking Period) takes a small carnelian bead found in the site of Repton and follows what may have been its journey through the Viking...

Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee: Leisure and Lifestyle in the Eighteenth Century is a collection of articles regarding Ottoman cultural history presented at a conference at Princeton University in 2005. As the title suggests, the book claims...

Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold by Stephen Fry is his first book in his Greek Mythology series. Stephen Fry has compiled the core myths from Greek mythology, beginning with the cosmogony or creation of the universe with the protogenoi or primordial...

Queens of Jerusalem: The Women Who Dared To Rule by Katherine Pangonis is a non-fiction book focussed on the lives of the royal women who ruled in the medieval Middle East (or Outremer) from 1099 to Saladin's conquest of Jerusalem in 1187...