Book Reviews

Syed Ameer Ali's account of the rise of Muslim Arabs is a tantalizing read, to say the least, every page made we want to read it further, and although some phrases got a bit repetitive by the end and sometimes the narrative was convoluted...

Ernle Bradford's Thermopylae: The Battle for the West is an exciting book for general enthusiasts of ancient history. This speedy read does not strictly focus on the Battle of Thermopylae (480 BCE), where Leonidas and the 300 Spartans held...

Aissa, the first daughter of the Lady and the Chief, was born with a small extra thumb on each hand, and because she was not perfect, she was to be thrown off the cliff. Instead, the wise woman Kelya gave Aissa to another family who raised...

Tigranes the Great: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Empire (A Comprehensive Historical Biography) by Serge Momjian is an instantly engaging work on the life and reign of the Armenian monarch Tigranes II (the Great, r. c. 95 - c. 56 BCE) written...

Author Wendy Orr (famous for Nim's Island, which has been turned into a motion picture) has created a captivating narrative aimed at young adults. The protagonist in Swallow's Dance is Leira, daughter of the high priestess on the Aegean island...

Philip II of Macedonia, by Ian Worthington, is a biography of Philip II, king of ancient Macedon from 360 to 336 BCE and father of Alexander the Great. Even though the figure of Philip is often obscured by the glory of his son, the book highlights...

Empires of Bronze: Son of Ishtar is Gordon Doherty's richly detailed fictionalization of events and people who lived during the height of the Hittite Empire. Set in the 1300s BCE, the story follows King Mursili's third son, Hattusili III...

Carlo Rovelli is first and foremost a scientist, an Italian theoretical physicist, who came to worldwide attention with his book, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics (2015 CE). Anaximander (first published in English in 2011 CE) is an earlier...

Few English-language histories of the country and land of Georgia have been written. Donald Rayfield's Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia attempts to fill this gap. Rayfield is a scholar of Russian and Georgian literature, and while he...