Sailing from Reviews

[bluegargantua]

Hi,

So last night I finished Sailing from Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World by Colin Wells. It pretty much does what it says on the tin -- which is disappointing because I was really looking more for a short book about Byzantium itself and not it's contribution to civilizations which followed it. It didn't really click how "not in Byzantium" the book would be.

But yeah, the book talks about how the Byzantine Empire influenced Western civilization (and contributed to the Renaissance), Arabic civilization (somewhat briefly however) and Slavic civilization (Russia seeing itself as the inheritor of Orthodox Christianity and Moscow as the "Third Rome"). Each of these strands gets its own section of the book. That's nice in the sense that it focuses on one thing at a time, but awful because there's a fair amount of jumping around and "so remember this other guy from the earlier part of the book? Yeah, this guy we're talking about now is a contemporary and they might've met in a bar or something". Byzantium itself doesn't get any coherent narrative.

Also? The book really needed some photos. There's lots of talk about architectural and artistic contributions from Byzantium and a few photos for each section would've gone a long way. There are some good maps and a nice time-line at the start, but some photos would've been ideal.

There is a fair amount of interesting information in the book, it just wasn't the information I was really looking for and the information the book does have isn't organized as well as I might like.

later
Tom

Comments

[spiritseeker.livejournal.com]

There's "Sailing to Sarantium" by Guy Gavriel Kay. Almost, but not quite Byzantium.