Will I love A Short History of Byzantium?

I love reading history and am fascinated by the Byzantines.

Norwich has an absolute gift not just for overviewing the major trends and events in history but also for choosing telling details that solidify the picture, reaching across centuries to empathize with people who were not so very different than us.

Plus, he’s scorchingly funny when the occasion calls for it. Both the abridged and the three-volume work walk that fine line between major events and small, crystalline, and often poignant or hysterically amusing details.

Based upon his classic three-volume earlier work, this book courageously boils down the thousand-year empire into a readable and understandable version. I found this work essential when I first decided to enter into a subject that I had become fascinated with but understood I needed a good, basic entry point to familiarize myself with before contemplating writing even fictional subject matter on the vast topic. It is not for nothing that we use the term “byzantine” as an adjective to denote complex or intricate issues, or so one discovers from Norwich’s easily readable synthesis. Still, this masterwork sorts out a… show more.