I wanted to love this book. But no.
I’m willing to write off this failure as my fault as much as Mary Beard’s. I’m not a professional historian, and so I was looking for a broad-strokes overview of Roman history, a subject I’m intrigued by but don’t know a great deal about. That is so not what this book does. And I made the added mistake of listening to the audio book instead of reading it myself.
I listened to the first half on my summer road-trip recently, and I was able to keep up with most of it. But even in that very concentrated environment, I struggled. Trying to listen to the rest at home, where distractions abound, was pointless. And to make it worse, the chapters were 90-100 minutes long.
So I’m not the right reader/listener for this, but I think Beard blows it, too, by indulging in massive digressions, having sections fold over onto each other, padding the chapters with so much arcana that may be interesting to a handful of Roman scholars but is absolutely wasted on us laypeople, and trying to tell us everything she can think of regarding a 1,000-year period.
History is a narrative. The word “story” is embedded in the term itself. Yet in the mass of details here, the story disappears. It was painful, to be honest. I don’t really understand anything more about Rome after having spent 18 1/2 hours listening.
Instead, I’ll turn back to fiction for some more Roman narratives and I’ll pick up Robert Graves’s I, Claudius.
I’m willing to write off this failure as my fault as much as Mary Beard’s. I’m not a professional historian, and so I was looking for a broad-strokes overview of Roman history, a subject I’m intrigued by but don’t know a great deal about. That is so not what this book does. And I made the added mistake of listening to the audio book instead of reading it myself.
I listened to the first half on my summer road-trip recently, and I was able to keep up with most of it. But even in that very concentrated environment, I struggled. Trying to listen to the rest at home, where distractions abound, was pointless. And to make it worse, the chapters were 90-100 minutes long.
So I’m not the right reader/listener for this, but I think Beard blows it, too, by indulging in massive digressions, having sections fold over onto each other, padding the chapters with so much arcana that may be interesting to a handful of Roman scholars but is absolutely wasted on us laypeople, and trying to tell us everything she can think of regarding a 1,000-year period.
History is a narrative. The word “story” is embedded in the term itself. Yet in the mass of details here, the story disappears. It was painful, to be honest. I don’t really understand anything more about Rome after having spent 18 1/2 hours listening.
Instead, I’ll turn back to fiction for some more Roman narratives and I’ll pick up Robert Graves’s I, Claudius.
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