Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Ancient History

For those of you who like their history fast paced and readable you can't go past Terry Jones' Barbarians. Jones has come a long way since being a member of Monty Python and has written a number of books on history.
Jones looks at popular history and then explores some of the facts about different barbarians, and shows that they were not all as uncivilised as we are led to believe. It is funny how most of the information we have on various barbarians comes from the people they were fighting, the Romans. Of course the Romans were not above changing the facts to make themselves look good.
Each chapter looks at a different barbarian tribe and are quite short so it is the type of book you can delve into at different times. I enjoyed reading this a lot and plan on investigating some more of Jones' work.
This book started life as a TV series written by Jones, but I have not seen it so can't comment on it. I have seen bad reviews of it though. On the other hand I think the book is great.

No comments:

Post a Comment