Book Reviews

Miyamoto Musashi was born in either the Harima Province of Japan or the village of Miyamoto in Mimasaka in 1584. Little is known about the life of Musashi, but what has been pieced together from a small number of reliable sources has highlighted...

Romila Thapar's latest addition to the study of the ancient history of India and its presence in modern times has been elegantly translated through her book Voices of Dissent: An Essay. Romila Thapar is an Emeritus Professor at Jawaharlal...

Ernle Bradford's Thermopylae: The Battle for the West is an exciting book for general enthusiasts of ancient history. This speedy read does not strictly focus on the Battle of Thermopylae (480 BCE), where Leonidas and the 300 Spartans held...

Empires of Bronze: Son of Ishtar is Gordon Doherty's richly detailed fictionalization of events and people who lived during the height of the Hittite Empire. Set in the 1300s BCE, the story follows King Mursili's third son, Hattusili III...

Carlo Rovelli is first and foremost a scientist, an Italian theoretical physicist, who came to worldwide attention with his book, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics (2015 CE). Anaximander (first published in English in 2011 CE) is an earlier...

The Emperors of Rome: The Story of Imperial Rome from Julius Caesar to the Last Emperor, by David Potter, tells the story of all the emperors of Rome from Augustus Caesar to Romulus Augustulus. Narrated with a general audience in mind, David...

Barbarians. The name itself calls to many minds the image of naked, painted, shrieking Celtic warriors rushing headlong into armored Roman legions, managing to lose the entirety of Gaul to Caesar as a result. But the term and the specific...