Timeline, very good but not exceptional
357376
Timeline keeps your interest but doesn't go the extra distance to make it an exceptional book. One is fascinated with time travel and the implications of going into the past. You get this with the development of a  time travel machine from a powerful and devious scientist. However, after  being set up we want to get into the details which are mundane. There is no  real development of characters and subplots, such as a love story or mano a  mano showdown between good and evil. Yes there is some fighting and some  allusion to romance but it is rather light. For instance, this period of  the early 1300s saw the superiority of the longbow versus the crossbow  (Battle of Crecy) in battle. Also, the Arabs developed in 1304 the first  arrow shooting device by gunpowder. That would have been a good concept to  exploit. We get no flavor of this but get the usual joust story in the book  which is OK but lame. Love story? Forget it. No one really cares about the  characters..who loves, dies, lives. At the end, there is a hint but for a  book this should have been fleshed out. Still, the concept is good and  there are some curve balls to keep you guessing. There are also allusions  that this period of the early 1300s were not the dark ages that we were  taught. We get a flavor but not enough substance other than being told that  the fabrics had nice colors. A TV movie is about the speed of this book  versus earthbreaking grounds like the book, Coma. Buy the paperback for the  long flight as it more than satisfies "chewing gum for the eyes and  brain".
3684111
This book covers an obscure period of history, the end of the ancient world and of the italian part of the Roman Empire, right through the birth of Islam; mostly via Constantinople, which was where it was at then. This is not a cheery period in history. One of the books's goals is to make connections between the ancient world and the various threads that lead eventually to modern Europe; I think it does an okay job with this, but possibly doesn't keep focused enough on that, when trying to cover the events of this period, which are both complicated and often tedious (all those barbarian tribes...)

It does a good job of threading through the barbarian migrations and characterizing the different groups, gets into the political and military complications of the period without going too deep or complicated, attempts to describe the religious issues and world views of the time, and covers the evolutionary and biological aspects of plague very well (as far as I know...) It touches on events in Persia and Arabia and economic issues. It's not too dry, there are some entertaining asides into personalities of Gibbon and Procopius. I didn't see anything obviously incorrect. It was very enjoyable to read.

The long-term consequences of the 6th c. plague, specifically on population, are not handled very well or deeply, and insofar as this is a book about the plague, the eastern empire, and the birth of europe (per the subtitle) it really should have got more attention. I was aware of the strong impacts of the 14th c plague on european society, but learned little if anything about the impact of the earlier outbreaks. So this is a good book to read if you are curious about this particular period in history and what all was going on, or just enjoy reading history; but it's not particularly a book about how the plague impacted a culture or society.
4672864
Nice, but doesn't quite live up to its potential. Many of the Then/Now photo pairs are from very different angles or distances, and so the contrast between eras is not always as dramatic as it could be. Don't wanna seem like a stickler, because it's a decent book, but if you are a real fan of Chicago and/or its history, you may find yourself wishing "why didn't they send a photographer to the exact same spot that this 1908 photo was taken from?" as you flip through the pages. The then/now technique has been done recently with more "wow" elsewhere, but until someone creates that book, this one's ok.
3706441
I liked the book and found gainful information; however, I wish it had a better dateline incorporated in the pages.
4829511
I liked that he had sources, a bibliography and an index.  I really liked the first part of the book, where he was talking about the ancient Sumerian and Vedic texts - we don't have many people who've done that research.

However, I found the links he implied between the ancient rulers and contemporary rulers and kingpins to be not very well argued, with scant documentation.  The second half of the book, which corresponded to the Middle Ages onward, to be easy to skim, and not very compelling.

I gave this four stars because the first half of the book is really first-rate, and is well-worth a read if you are interested in who we are, and what our history is.  Which I am.
4354300
I enjoyed this book and learned quite a bit about what happened at Columbine. I have always been fascinated by this story and was morbidly curious to learn every detail I could. However I really didn't care for the way the author jumped around with the timeline of events. For example he'd be talking about the day of the shooting, then go back in time and talk about Eric and Dylan planning the attack, then jump ahead to Patrick Ireland recovering in the hospital, etc. There was no reason for this. I wished he would just tell the story in chronological order!
4202038
I enjoyed the book very much. I don't like the going back and forth timeline but the story was very good.
4612402
This book was very good, but not excellent. There were times I felt the book was going around in circles aimlessly. At times, it seemed to go along at a very good pace, which made the read go quickly. I thought each character, and the Doctor in particular were outlined very close to the tv series. His manerisms and speech were like what I had seen of the tv series. The history period seemed very close to what history has written for us, with the 4 main characters just thrown in for the ride, trying to change history, but realizing that perhaps they cannot change history, except ever so slightly, and one small person at a time....I liked this book a lot, it got drug down at times by the silliness of the entire excursion, which is why I only gave it 4 stars.
3965187
This book is VERY interesting. Davis writes it as something between a novel and a serious historical text.  As such you do have a narrative arch and a good consideration on the quality of the text; but at the same time she spends her time in placing caveats to the story she is writing.  So we have at times "alternate" possibilities to what happened, and she certainly accepts a lack of climax in explaining some important later characters which historians have been better able to study.
Davis also seems to assume you have seen the movie of the same title (to which she consulted), and wrote the book as an appendix to the movie.  Very fun.
416612
Pretty good, but a bit disjointed and "rushed" in places
4105702
I read the book 12 years ago and thought it was great.  I read it again this month and have to say it's just okay.  In the intervening years I have done a lot more reading on the subject, mostly trying to find some information about the time I spent in Vietnam with the US Army.  The book is definitely worth reading, but it's written at about 8th grade level, not on a lofty scholarly plane.  My two specific criticisms are the lack of a bibliography and repeated references to the "13 month tour" for the Army.  As any Marine will loudly tell you, they did 13 months.  The rest of us did 12 months, unless they got early outs like me.  Buy Dunnigan's and Nofi's book as an introduction to the Vietnam War and then start digging into the Time Life Vietnam Experience series for the details.

<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/The-Vietnam-Experience-25-Volume-Set-Complete/dp/B000VPORLW/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">The Vietnam Experience - 25 Volume Set Complete</a>
1342590
This is a nice chronological depiction of Irish history. Additional background information would make it better
4626453
Good history but a little slow in presentation
3832074
Four stars is a little high for this book, but three would definitely have been too low. The plot is interesting, if somewhat implausible; the characters are reasonably well-handled (except for Commodore Wolfe, whose handling was not  particularly consistent), the writing was generally good if not spectacular. Perhaps my biggest objection is in an anachronism within the Star Trek universe: if the Federation had had to deal with the question of self-aware AIs as early as this, certainly the Next Generation episode "The Measure of the Man" would never have happened; Data would automatically have been accepted as more than a machine, without the need for a trial. Of course, this book came out at about the same time as that episode, probably a bit earlier, so one can hardly blame the authors for that fact; still, "Next Gen" was already a year into its run when this book was published, and clearly ALL of the questions raised by Data's existence (to say nothing of Voyager's EMH, who WASN'T part of the canon yet, but who even more poorly fits into a timeline in which this book is placed) would have long since been answered were this book to be considered canonical. So clearly, it must be considered one of the many Star Trek novels to exist in some nearly-parallel universe, rather than the "real" Trek universe.
1008902
Goldsworthy is an apt writer, not at the levels of the masters but very readable. His Caesar is complete and well organized. The three main sections are almost the same length: "Rise to Consulship", "Proconsul" (which covers mainly the Gaul and British campaigns) and "Civil War and Dictatorship". This gives you an idea of the scope and depth of each section.

The first part is very good indeed. It discusses a lot of background and the setting for Caesar's early life. Inevitably there's a lot of guessing of the future Dictator's actions, but it is a complete account of the rise of Caesar and the one I enjoyed the most. The second part (the Gaul and British campaigns) is much less successful, with a tendency towards pure description. It is too long compared with the rest of the book and has a lot of unnecessary detail that doesn't engage the reader.

The final section ("Civil War and Dictatorship") could be a complete book on it's own. One misses in Goldsworthy more detail and explanation of the political implications of everything that's happening. For instance, he rushes through the process when Caesar is named Dictator for life, and doesn't explain how the political process evolved to that. Compared to the amount of details of the second part, this is a bit disappointing.

It's an entertaining book and one learns a lot from it, but don't expect great insight or fantastic writing and storytelling.
3939853
This is not a bad read by any means, but I did not enjoy this as much as the other time travel books by Susan. There were some really good parts, but some of it really slogged along, and by absorbing Frankie into her mortal counterself it took the book in a completely different direction then I thought it would. The change of perspective without even any hash marks or anything was really jarring too. It would do well to reprint the book with distinctions to show who the speaker is. This is still worth picking up though. I am enjoying learning about and expereiencing different periods of history with Susan's time travel books. They are a delight!
2486649
It's ok. The author did a good job bringing together a general timeline, but I felt he was lacking on detailed information and nailing down specific dates. There was a lot of hypothetical dates placed to events. I felt like Ussher did a better job and he lived 400 years ago.