Review by Choice Review
This is the first volume in a new, accessible, narrative world history series. Bauer (College of William and Mary) seasons her prose with interesting details, such as the use of peppercorns to help support Ramses II's "distinctively large nose" during his embalming so that the "tight bandages would not flatten it." Brief chapters and comparative time lines allow readers to make steady progress through the volume's 856 pages. Bauer justifies her approach to such a sprawling topic: "in this volume, we will not spend a great deal of time in Australia, or the Americas, or for that matter Africa, but for a slightly different reason. The oral histories of these cultures, old as they are, don't stretch back nearly as far as the older lists of kings from Mesopotamia...." Indeed, the book's subtitle would more accurately be "From the Earliest Written Accounts to the Reign of Constantine." Bauer does not reach the fall of Rome, but rather the transformation of pagan Rome into "something much more powerful, both for good and for evil." Summing Up: Recommended. General and undergraduate libraries. T. J. Bond Washington State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Bauer's annals, which span the millennia between the traces of Sumer and the Roman emperor Constantine's conversion to Christianity in 312 CE, are an attractive introduction to a subject vast in time and geography. She writes briskly and interpretively, and is attuned throughout to the challenge of rulers: appearing to the ruled as legitimate holders of power. This sensibility makes her narratives acutely interesting, as Bauer pierces the biases inherent in most ancient sources to discern the sincerity or the cynicism with which power seekers pursued their goals. Above, approval of the divine was invaluable; on Earth, a loyal army was indispensable. Acquiring both enabled lawgivers to make their writ stick, and Bauer's chronicles exhibit the interaction of priestly, military, and legal powers as empires and dynasties wax and wane. This endows continuity to her accounts of polities as disparate as the Harappan civilization of the Indus River or the states that emerged from misty prehistory along the Yellow and Yangtze rivers to form China. Nonacademic and sometimes colloquial in composition, Bauer's survey will spark the imagination. --Gilbert Taylor Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Bauer (author of the four-volume The Story of the World: History for the Classical Child) guides readers on a fast-paced yet thorough tour of the ancient worlds of Sumer, Egypt, India, China, Greece, Mesopotamia and Rome. Drawing on epics, legal texts, private letters and court histories, she introduces individuals who lived through the famines, plagues, floods, wars and empire building of the ancient world: the marvelous array of characters includes Gilgamesh, Sumer's first epic hero; Y?, the founder of the Xia dynasty in China; and Tiglath-Pileser III, who restored the Assyrian empire's fortunes. Because Bauer covers so much time and territory, she focuses on the Western cultures with which she seems most comfortable; the chapters on Asia and India are the least developed. In addition, some of her assertions-for instance, that the biblical book of Joshua is the clearest guide we possess to the establishment of an Israelite kingdom in Canaan-contradict general scholarly opinion or are simply wrong. However, Bauer's elegant prose and her command of much of the material makes this a wonderful starting point for the study of the ancient world. 80 maps. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
First in a four-volume history series from a William & Mary professor who also homeschools her four children, this promises to be the work of a very fertile mind. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
