Pictorial History Of Our War With Spain For Cuba'S Freedom (1898) Book

Having recently returned from Italy, I've been indulging my nostalgia by re-watching that excellent HBO series Rome. While I love the series, I've never been fully convinced by the major female characters and their relationships, so I've always been curious to find out more about them. I found this book while idling by a bookshop's bargain table and snatched it up. However, as with most impulsive actions, it proved unsatisfactory.

This book is decidedly disappointing, and fails to fulfil any of the promises in its title except, perhaps for 'brief'. Of its 230 pages, fewer than half are devoted to the emperors, while the rest of the book is about Roman society in general. According to the acknowledgements, this book started as magazine reviews of these emperors' biographies, and unfortunately little, if nothing, was done to reshape these articles into a readable book.

Written in a 'racy' style which consists of long, convoluted and bewildering sentences, the biographical chapters are disappointingly brief, lacking in detail and badly edited. One sentence was missing a 'not' so that it said the contrary to what was intended. And after calling Nero's mother (correctly) Agrippina for a whole chapter, in the next chapter he refers to her as Messalina (Claudius' previous wife). Needless to say I found no answers to my initial questions.

All in all a book I could not recommend.