Book Reviews

Before he passed away in 2020, David Ringrose was Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, San Diego. He was an expert on the history of Spain while also having an interest in world history at large. As the book's Preface...

Paul Varley, who passed away in 2015, was a professor of Japanese history at Columbia University for many years before coming to the University of Hawai’i. He specialized in the Kamakura and Muromachi periods. Varley's book, Warriors of Japan...

This is a volume in the New Oxford World History series. The aim of the series is to provide an account of world history that is broader than the old approach that tends to focus only on Europe and North America. The author of Japan in World...

This is a volume in the New Oxford World History series. According to the Editor’s Preface, the aim of this series is to "offer readers an informed, up-to-date and lively history of the world" that avoids the ethnocentric bias of traditional...

The Story of Tutankhamun by egyptologist Garry J. Shaw is a brilliantly written new biography of the boy king, spanning from his birth and early life under his father Akhenaten’s new religious regime, all the way up to his death and the discovery...

Behind the Scientific Revolution was a revolution in mindset and perspective. During the Middle Ages, the search for new knowledge in Europe was constrained by a theocratic society. The Renaissance helped to remove some of those limits and...

This is a paperback edition of a book that was first published as a hardback in 2019. The author, Constantine Nomikos Vaporis, is a professor of history at Maryland University and has published several academic books on Japanese history...

The central idea of Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones's Persians: The Age of the Great Kings is simple. The Achaemenid Persian Empire, which flourished from the sixth to fourth centuries BCE, was unjustly smeared by its Greek enemies as barbaric and...

Stephen Gaukroger, Emeritus Professor of History of Philosophy and Science at the University of Sydney, presents a fresh viewpoint toward examining the history of Western philosophy. His book The Failures of Philosophy: A Historical Essay...

This is a fairly old book since it was first published in 1996, but it remains the best English-language introduction to the history of the warrior class in ancient Japan. In English, Japanese warriors are usually referred to as ‘samurai’...