Reviews for Scribner'S Popular History Of The United States V2

The average rating for Scribner'S Popular History Of The United States V2 based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-02-02 00:00:00 Jason Mann There was a lot of good information in this book but the author was not great at organizing his ideas in an order that the reader could understand. Introducing facts about characters that had died in a previous sentence, for example. Even the biography chapters were not in chronological order. The author made many grammatical errors as well. Again, in the end: facts were as interesting as the writing was horrid.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-10-09 00:00:00 Tony Geneau 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.