Book Reviews

In The Heretic of Cacheu, Toby Green uses one extraordinary life to illuminate a broader historical landscape shaped by commerce, belief, gender, and cultural negotiation. Cacheu, located in present-day Guinea-Bissau, was a small but vital...

John Haywood, who received a PhD in early medieval European history, is a veteran of creating historical atlases, and his latest book does not disappoint. The Making of the Middle Ages focuses on the period that has traditionally been described...

The Maya Myths: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes and Ancestors by Mallory E. Matsumoto is the eighth instalment of Thames and Hudson’s mythology guides series and has succeeded in packing a huge quantity of information into a relatively short...

Born in the year 894, Aethelstan was the third in a remarkable line of great warrior kings from Wessex. His grandfather, Alfred the Great, halted the Viking advance into southern England; his father, Edward the Elder, reconquered the Viking...

In 1066 and All That (1930), a parody book of English history, Cnut is described as a "bad king," who "became a good king." While this is a simplistic overview, it captures the essence of the portrait Ryan Lavelle paints in Cnut: The North...

With Tamta’s World: The Life and Encounters of a Medieval Noblewoman from the Middle East to Mongolia, Anthony Eastmond, currently the AG Leventis Professor of Byzantine Art at The Courtauld Institute of Art, offers us a vivid account of...

The Colony and the Company by Malick W. Ghachem is an articulately written and intellectually ambitious work that offers a compelling historical lens through which readers can examine the early foundations of the Caribbean’s most influential...

Racism is often considered a question of thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. The accused racist will sometimes deploy the tired old defense that he or she "has black friends," a defense that only makes sense if racism is exclusively defined...

Ordinarily, when one considers a book about ancient Egypt, one might think about discussions surrounding the culture, language, religion, and surviving architecture. Not so, in this case. Empress of the Nile: The Daredevil Archaeologist Who...

Alexander von Humboldt: A Concise Biography by Andreas W. Daum, published by Princeton University Press and translated by Robert Savage, offers a compact yet thoughtful introduction to one of the most compelling figures in world history...