Review: The Fate of Rome

[felicitygs]

Goodreads link

It's the end of the year, so I'm busy trying to speed my way through a few more books! I picked this up because I've always been fascinated by diseases and disease history, and it just happened to intersect with a passing interesting in Roman history as well. 

Short review: I don't think this book would be very good for someone not already interested in the subject.

Longer review: The information and sources provided by Harper in this work are very interesting, but unfortunately I found myself often glazing over a bit because they can't seem to write with more simple language. While I consider myself well-read and have a fairly large vocabulary, there were multiple instances where I had to look up a word--only to find a far simpler word that could have been used. I don't really think that's helpful for an already dense subject. Beyond that, I also often felt that they tended to exaggerate or overstate with their adjectives. If it were fiction, I'd say this is full of purple prose--there's good stuff in here, but god, is it hard to get at.

That said, Harper clearly knows their stuff, and the case they put forward for both the influence of disease and climate change on the growth and fall of the Roman Empire is incredibly interesting. Details and information are all contextualized as well as possible.

The audience for this book is very much people with a deep interest in Roman history; interest in the history of climate change or diseases are useful, but they certainly won't help get you through the dense text. I also wouldn't recommend this to someone who isn't passingly familiar with Roman history; I wouldn't say you need a deep knowledge at all (I certainly don't have one), but being familiar with the arc and general beats of the society are vital to properly understand the work.

So that's a tentative recommendation; if you're a mega Rome nerd, casually or academically, definitely read this. If you're not, I think you could safely pass this by.

 

Comments

[hhunt]

Thank you for taking your time for the review.

[felicitygs]

Thanks for reading!