Alan J > Recent Status Updates

The author is not bad on the science, but his grasp of history is about what you’d expect from a physicist—troubled by generalizations that are not only often wrong, but overly simple. Example: barbarians were poorly organized and couldn’t stand up to Roman methods of warfare. Then, a few pages later, he described the Gothic rout of the Romans at Adrianople. I gave up at 13 per cent.

Finished the first third, dealing with Grierson’s long raid from Tennessee down to Baton Rouge. There’s nothing flashy about Dee Brown’s writing, but by about fifty pages in I was obsessed with seeing the story through. Moving onto part two, The Bold Cavaliers.