Educator's Guide to Texas School Law Book

A friend gave me this book because I was looking for a history of Greece which encompassed both ancient and modern times. In Greece, I kept hearing Greek people say "We are not just ancient Greece," and my traveling companion noted that Greece is a place where history has been colonized.

This wasn't especially good for that; as the author freely admits, his modern history is sketchy, and basically stops around 1834 (except for a long-ish epilogue) because that's when Athens ceased to be independent. The writing is only okay, and the author's opinions are occasionally very irritating. But the facts are useful, and seem mostly accurate, and I learned a lot I didn't know.

In particular, I didn't know that Athens vanished into complete obscurity (literally not appearing on maps) for a few hundred years between its conquest by Macedonia and the fall of the Ottoman Empire. I didn't know how completely it slipped away from being an important city for much longer than that few hundred years. And I didn't know that it had been ruled by Macedonia, Rome, the Franks, the Catalans, the Venetians, and the Turks (and I might be forgetting a few).

You have to be really interested in Greek history to stick with this one, and I still would rather find something by someone who was (a) Greek, and (b) not completely fascinated by ancient Athens. But I'm not sorry I read it.