Book Reviews

Another fine Osprey book covering ancient greek warships from 500-322BC with sections on origins, design, construction, crew, armament and tactics, the Athenian navy, key battles, and the Olympias modern reconstruction project. A mix of colour...

Having visited the Peloponese and just half-filled a suitcase of books on ancient Greece, I saw this at the airport on the way home. It turned out to be the best of the lot. Schliemann and Evans - two of the most controversial archaeologists...

In Conquering Chaos: Alexander the Great’s Wisdom for Leading in Disruptive Times, Steve Muscato attempts to synthesise the lightning-fast military conquests of the 4th century BCE with the high-stakes demands of modern corporate leadership...

Gone Viking III: The Holy Grail by Bill Arnott is a travel writing narrative with not just insight but also quirkiness gifted by the author. General enthusiasts and armchair adventurers are its target audience. While not a traditional scholarly...

The presence of women in positions of power has consistently captivated individuals, and the reign of Eleanor of Aquitaine is a prime example of this phenomenon. Born in 1122, she was a prominent medieval queen who held power in both France...

The book opens with a summary of Ptolemaic history up to the ascension of Ptolemy III and a reasonable overview of the Ptolemaic Kingdom's constituent parts. This serves to establish the setting in which the book takes place, including Egypt...

In The Problem of Immigration, readers are introduced to a familiar historical struggle between the states and the federal government regarding matters of constitutional interpretation. Slave states in the antebellum period perceived a government...

I was intrigued by the title of Nancy Marie Brown’s latest book Looking for the Hidden Folk: How Iceland’s Elves Can Help Save the Earth. In many ways, I am the ideal audience for this book: a history and anthropology enthusiast with limited...

When I first saw the title of this book, I was excited to read it. Many studies on the Silk Road focus on its eastern end in China or its southern sections in the Middle East, but few scholars have looked at the relationship between Central...

El Dorado, the legendary city of gold, is used as an allusion by H. W. Brands in his recent book to describe how 19th-century Americans viewed the land west of the Mississippi River. One could describe the history of the United States with...