Sailing from Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World @ richardeward.com

Sailing from Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World
by Colin Wells
from Tantor Media

Features:

• Audiobook
• CD
• Unabridged

Customer Reviews:

• Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0

• Treasure box of information
  This book is a real treasure box for those inclined in the history of Byzantium and its legacy. I've previously read several books on Byzantium, yet immensely enjoyed Colin Wells' special view on Byzantine history, i.e. Byzantium's legacy in the West and the East. The book reads extremely well and is written for a general audience and not much pre-existing knowledge of Byzantine history is required to fully enjoy it. I particularly liked the chapters on the Italian renaissance and the spread of the Orthodox... more info

• ideal for the lay reader with a scholarly bent
  This is a excellent popular history about the impact of Byzantine culture on Renaissance Italy, the Arabs during their Baghdad apogee, and the Slavic world as it was differentiating into nationalities. While it is best to have a good grasp of these four periods of history, in particular Byzantium's, the author offers good skeletal explanations of vast swaths of time.
  First, Byzantine scholars preserved most of what texts we know today as ancient Greek. They represented a crucial step in the evolution... more info

• wonderful reading
  a wonderful reading detailing the relevance of the Byzantine Empire to todays world. Highly recommended to anyone interested in how the past influences the present.

• Too many unpronounceable names and not enough "why we should learn how to pronounce them"
  Survey of how Byzantium influenced the Western, Arabic, and Slavic cultures and religions it touched temporally and geographically, does a good job of setting the historical foundations of each interaction, but then gets bogged down in lists of names and places. Wells needs to spend less time typing unpronounceable names and more time explaining why we should try to figure out how to say them; that is to say, he needs to provide more context to explain why we need to care.

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