We continue to use insights developed during the middle ages, sometimes without even realizing it. If Falk spent more time examining ideas like that, rather than diverting into historical fiction, The Light Ages would be a far stronger book.
Romance of the Three Kingdoms Review
Sometimes likened to a Chinese Odyssey, the story is epic in a literal sense, at some eight hundred thousand words over one hundred twenty chapters, and its structure has more in common with modern storytelling than you might expect.
Plot Timing
If you want to tell the story of, say, the rise and fall of a civilization, or even an institution, in a way to fully capture it, you are often left to tell the story of a snapshot of that institution and use it as a lens by which to examine the rest.
Atlas of Medieval Europe Review
Organized by both timeframe and subject, the collection presents the clearest maps I’ve ever found in a history book, which usually attempt to cram far too much information into a single, static map. With Atlas of Medieval Europe, you can instead experience a kind of stop-motion animation as you watch Europe evolve over the course of a few centuries.
The Brick Moon Review
In 1869, a century before the moon landing, eighty-eight years before Sputnik 1, and one hundred nine years before the first navigational satellite, Edward Everett Hale used a science fiction story to propose launching an artificial satellite into polar orbit to enable anyone, anywhere, to determine their longitude by measuring the satellite’s elevation from the horizon.
Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini Review
With many caveats, this is said to be the first autobiography, which is the reason it ended up on my reading list. To be more specific, it is the earliest surviving autobiographical text written with the intent of being autobiographical in nature, as opposed to serving some other didactic purpose while being incidentally autobiographical.
Deorbiting the Space Station
Like the Mercury and Apollo capsules, like the space shuttles, the ISS, to borrow a phrase, belongs in a museum.
The Bookseller of Florence Review
To what extent do the books that come down to us from long ago do so because they are exceptional and there have been deliberate efforts to preserve them throughout the ages, and to what extent are they books that, by accident or happenstance, have happened to survive into the present?
History of the Peloponnesian War Review
The Peloponnesian War was a world war, drawing in all the Greek polities through a network of alliances, and, over twenty-seven years, involving diverse foreign powers, from Persia, to Egypt, to Italy, and even parts of Europe. To the Greeks, that was the world, and for twenty-seven years the world warred.
Philip and Alexander Review
I could have read about Alexander the Great from one of the many historical sources who wrote about him, either contemporaneous with his campaigns, or within a few centuries, but such ancient works tend not to capture what I hoped to find in Philip and Alexander: an exploration of both kings’ reigns, and how the one informed the other.
IGC Publishing 