Reading Still Matters

     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...

Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West is a work of narrative history by the famous historian and novelist Tom Holland.   Persian Fire chronicles the rise of the Persian Empire and its first great kings - Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes, as well as the struggle of Darius and Xerxes to pacify the quarrelsome city states of what would become Greece.     This was a project that ended badly for the Persians. Buy it on Amazon:  https://amzn.to/4aBYeiy The narrative really beings with the roots of the Persian people itself. The Persians were the ancestors of Aryan horse people who inhabited the mountains east of the early empire builders of Babylon and Assyria.   Eventually, the empire of Medes would arise and conquer much of the fertile crescent.   The power of Media eventually brought it into conflict with the people who became known as the Persians. It was this conflict with Media that kick started the power of Persian and their rise of t...

Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom by Tom Holland is very interesting take on Western Europe during the two centuries surrounding the apocalyptic year 1000.  Basically, Holland takes us through a 200-year period across the various regions of Europe in order to demonstrate that the events of this time period created the society that would ultimately become modern Europe.  For Holland, this was the period when the area that is now Europe became something other than just the shattered remains of the Western Roman Empire.   Buy it on Amazon:  https://amzn.to/4oinnEB The historical narrative pivots around the year 1000 and the pervasive fear of the Antichrist and the Second Coming, and digs in on how these apocalyptic anxieties influenced the actions of rulers, clergy, and peasants alike. Generally, Holland works the history region by region. Treating as separate but connected narratives, the happenings in what would become Italy, Spain, Fran...