Book Reviews

The Cambridge Illustrated History of China gives a very comprehensive account of the country's development from prehistory to the modern day. The author, Patricia Buckley Ebrey, is one of the foremost scholars of Chinese history but she does...

The Love God, the novel by Martin Campbell, tells the story of Antinous, the Greek man who conquered Hadrian, the great Roman emperor. The novel begins in Claudiopolis with the birth of Antinous and a serious accident that would leave a deep...

In some ways, the title 'Documents of Ancient Greek Music' (DAGM) is slightly misleading, since some two-thirds of these documents are 'Roman'. Pedantry aside, while many of these 61 documents are by date Roman, they are all composed in Greek...

The Empress Wu Zetian (690-704 CE) is the only female ruler in the history of China. Even though there were many important and influential women throughout China's history, only one ever became the most powerful political figure in the country...

In Gods, Kings, and Merchants in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia, Dominique Charpin (Professor at Collège de France, Paris) examines the manners in which the religious, political, and economic spheres maintained fluid boundaries, often time intersecting...

Religions of the Constantinian Empire by Mark Edwards is a phenomenal book. He writes a very comprehensive book on the beginnings of and influences on Christianity in the Constantinian Empire. He divides his study into three parts. The first...

The First Emperor: Selections from the Historical Records by Sima Qian, translated by Raymond Dawson is an abridged version of Sima Qian's much longer history. Sima Qian (145-86 BCE) is known as the Grand Historian of China and an important...

Dubai is a city that elicits sharp opinions. While its shopping malls, glittering lights, luxury hotels and villas, and iconic futuristic architecture continue to attract large numbers of tourists and business investors, many others simply...