"A History of the Roman World"

A History of the Roman World: 753 to 146 BC (H.H. Scullard)

What do you say about a book that devotes as many pages to neolithic and pre-historic Italy as it does to Rome under its seven kings? Well, in my case, I say that I didn't finish it, and that I didn't like it very much, and that everything in the book I either knew already or had a hard time caring about. The consensus seems to be that this is an old but good book, whereas I just found it unreadable - not only because of the author's weird choice of what to cover, but also because it's devided up by theme instead of chronologically. Sometimes this works, but here it doesn't. I guess all you need to know was that I was already skimming within the first ten pages of how the old stone age turned into the bronze age. Skip.

Grade: D-