Reading Still Matters

I finally got around to digging into the fall of the Roman Empire. No, I didn’t read Edward Gibbon’s famous study of the decline and fall of said Roman Empire. Instead, I picked something more recent.   There has been so much new archeology, so much new scientific work on the classical period, that I thought it made sense to read something more contemporary.   I will get to Gibbon someday. Purchase at The Fall of the Roman Empire at Amazon :  https://amzn.to/45tMQT3   Instead, I read The Fall of the Roman Empire, by historian Peter Heather.   In this major reconsideration of the history the collapse of the western Roman Empire, Heather argues that Rome did not fall because of the decline of Roman martial virtue, internal moral decay or economic collapse, or even the spread of Christianity. Instead, Heathers argues that centuries of Roman friction with the Germanic peoples across the Rhine transformed neighboring these tribes into economically more advanced, ...

     Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic is the first in a series of books on ancient Rome by the famous popular history writer Tom Holland. The other two are Pax and Dynasty. And what a page turner Rubicon is!  My biggest complaint about this book is that I found myself reading way faster than I wanted to read.  It’s like that suspenseful novel that you race through because you need to get to that next page. And that’s despite the fact that I knew where things were going to end up.                                            Check it out on Amazon here:   https://amzn.to/4uvDdxj The book starts in 49 B.C. as Julius Caesar and his legions contemplate crossing a small border river called the Rubicon. No Roman general is allowed to cross that border without authorization and so...

There is a group of people out there who really do feel the history of a place while traveling. I am not sure how big that group of people is, but I do know that I consider myself among that tribe. You may be a member if you sit down on old stones to soak in the feel of an ancient place, hear the voices of old as you walk beneath decaying fortifications, or pause as you realize that you just walked down a path that Roman emperor may have strolled on his way to the Coliseum.        Hiking through History: Hannibal, Highlanders & Joan of Arc is a book written by Kirk Ward Robinson which will appeal to anyone in this tribe of history oriented travellers. Hiking through History was originally written in the early 2000s and released in 2011.  More recently, the Highland Home publishing house has released an updated anniversary edition, and this updated 2026 release is the edition that I was fortunate enough to read.  Buy it on Amazon:  https://amzn.to...

A History of Ancient Rome in Twelve Coins is a fantastic look into Roman history by author Gareth Harney.  This is the kind of book that any history lover can get into, regardless of whether they are interested in ancient or Roman history or not.  Why? Because it brings together two awesome subjects – Rome and ancient coins.  History nerds unite! Buy it on Amazon:  https://amzn.to/4vHWr3Y      Like the title suggests, Harney takes twelve different coins and then creates a separate chapter for each coin and goes into the historical subject of the chapter, how the coin relates to the subject of the chapter, and in many cases the way the coin is used as modern evidence of the thing being discussed.      We basically cover the 1,200-year history of Rome, from its legendary founding to the fall of the Western Empire.   I loved the entire concept of building a book about Rome and coins because, as Harney, argues in the book, coins wer...