Book Reviews

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’...

Japan is known for many different things, but one popular image associated with the country is that of the ‘samurai’. Especially, many people admire the idea of the ‘samurai spirit’ encapsulated in the concept of ‘bushido’ – the ‘way of the...

Hannibal: A Hellenistic Life is a biography of the famous Carthaginian leader Hannibal Barca, who lived between 247 and 188 BCE. Son of the brilliant general Hamilcar, who had taken part in the First Punic War (264-241 BCE), Hannibal inherited...

The story of the forty-seven samurai is a well-known tale not only in Japan but also around the world. There are many different versions but the plot always revolves around a group of warriors carrying out a vendetta in order to get revenge...

To argue whether the Vikings or Christopher Columbus was the first European to set foot in America is more of an argument of religious and heritage pride than archaeological evidence. In Norse America: The Story of a Founding Myth, Gordon...