John Edwards

The first two hundred pages of the history progresses at breakneck speed, dazzling the reader with strings of names, events, and sensational acts. The reader feels like a deer at night in headlights. There's just too much stuffed into each page. It's also hard to fathom how the author could extract so much personal detail from ancient history, much of it truly gruesome. The focus seems to be on warring, torturing, perverse sex, poisoning, executing, and murdering. This gets to be tedious at times. The writing is somewhat poorly edited, containing errors in grammar, contradictions, unexplained acts, dampening the desire to read on, despite there being plenty of interesting information. The copious footnotes are helpful and fascinating. Learning how events in different parts of the world were happening simultaneously is interesting, However, the reader is left wondering how and where the author could possibly have sourced so much detail. The overall impression left on my reading so far is one of feeling dizzy and unsatisfied.