Caesar: Life of a Colossus by Adrian Goldsworthy
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Book Reviews of Caesar: Life of a Colossus
Book Review: Outstanding work of art
Summary: 5 Stars
One of the best written books I have seen in a long time. Not only is the book well written, its also an easy read. The authors writing style is fluid and easy to follow.
Well worth the time and the money.
Book Review: Entertaining
Summary: 4 Stars
This is a good book, though it lacks a little organization. It's linear and accumulative. The story is not that well broken down into smaller issues like different size pieces of a puzzle, rather it's more like an accumulation of identical logs or bricks that amount to the thick book we have here. Facts and dates just follow each other in sequence. The truth is the author has enough talent to not get too messy, though at times it is monotonous. A clearer structure and less blurry lines between issues, dates and locations could have helped. If you want to go back and find the exact page where a certain issue is dealt with, it is going to be hard.
Looks like a lot of cons but overall the book is readable thanks to its almost popular style, modern students friendly.
A note that meant a lot to me as a Spaniard, and that I can't help mentioning: "In 92 BC an edict closed down schools teaching rhetoric Latin, stating that instruction in Greek was superior, even for teaching a man to make speeches in Latin (...) this measure was in part intended to prevent the oratorical skills useful in public life from becoming too common, for such schools were not likely to have taken pupils from those families outside the Senate (...) so this continued the emphasis on what would be useful rather than on acquiring purely academic learning." This reminded me of the banning of the Spanish language in schools in Cataluña (Spain) for the partisan interests of the entrenched nazionalist class; a class that lives on well-paid government jobs and subsidies and is throwing overboard a whole cultural legacy that belongs to a larger community than their own clan.
A whole lot we still have to learn from history (and from books like this one), from Roman history specifically. Treat yourself and take sides between Cato and Caesar. But try to understand the other side too.
Book Review: Good, informative but why, oh why?!
Summary: 4 Stars
This is a book I would recommend to anyone with some curiousity about "how Rome worked"...provided the reader has a strong mental filter to separate fact from fiction. It is readable, and the author's English is delightful, in the sense that there is something of the turn of the Century (19th-to-20th - not 20th-to-21st) elegance in it. The focus is perhaps more on the "workings of Rome" than on Caesar's most important years affecting Rome - the author is a bit too shy to appear to "endorse a Dictator". And, this is the weakness of the book. It is somewhat like historical works published in the Soviet era in the Soviet Union or one of its satellites. (Yevgeniy Tarlé's works on Napolean and Talleyrand come to mind [ Bonaparte, ]. Superb history, but Tarlé, a Soviet author, must pay homage to dialectic materialism).. In this case the author cannot keep himself from paying homage to all the "important" concepts that make a British academic "politicaly acceptable". Why, oh why, do so many today contaminate their excellent work with the eager additions to show that their thinking, by they way, corresponds to what is required? In this respect, the Introduction is outright painful. Also, to be popular in the early 21st Century, we must write about sex, sex, sex... Of course, we are just speculating, and therefore to avoid any danger of being accused of mixing history with fiction, we put in some weasel-words when we have no sources... The reason why this otherwise excellent work does not get five stars is the author's self-demeaning with his eagerness to prove that he is Politically Correct.Book Review: Little new to talk about Caesar
Summary: 4 Stars
It certainly is a good biography. The problem any reader like myself has is that we have read it most of it before. Unfortunately there is little new to report about Caesar's life so you end out reading much of what you have already read. You know this French leader, will start his rebellion, you know what will happen to him and most of the other characters in the narrative.
To overcome this problem what the writer did here was repeatably introducing little known facts of Rome and the period to keep the interest of the readers that know Caesar's history interest up. In this he did a good job.
So I ended out enjoying the book.
Book Review: Good, Factual
Summary: 4 Stars
I learned a lot from this book and recommend it for anyone seeking an introduction to Caesar. The writing itself was workmanlike but good enough to let the subject carry the reader through the material. The author's strength is military history, which occupies about half of the narrative. The political half is still interesting but clearly out of his expertise, though he is good enough. The author is not one to weave a conjectural projection by filling in the gaps of the historical record with his own thoughts, so the effect is dry but historiographical at points (though this is not a formal academic work by any means).