winterbadger | Entries tagged with rome

I realized that in my last entry I left off a book. I've also finished another since then.

Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons From Malaya and Vietnam by John A. Nagl (24) Originally his doctoral dissertation, this book by John Nagl (a lieutenant colonel in the US Army and former Rhodes Scholar) compares the organizational learning behaviors of the British Army during the Malayan Emergency and the US Army during the Vietnam War. As a reworked thesis might be expected to be, it's a bit dry for the casual reader and a bit academic for the average military history reader, but nonetheless it does a good job of douign what it sets out to do--documenting how different organizations adapat to situations that they're not accustome to, in this case armies fighting a different sort of war than they have been prepared to fight through training, doctrine, and equipment. The British took a few years but adapated and successfully developed the capability to fight a counterinsurgency campaign. Nagl suggests that this has a lot to do with the sort of conflicts that the British had historically fought, though I think he discounts the historical focus in the regular Army on conventional warfare. The American Army, even with the experience ot the British Army in Malaya to call on, did not adapt to the challenge of dealing with unconventional warfare, continuing to try to fight guerrillas in the jungle using equipment and tactics developed to fight the Russians in Germany and ignoring the political element of the conflict as long as they could.

Roman Blood by Stephen Saylor (25) The first (both in order of publication and chronologically) of Stephen Saylor's novels about the detective Gordianus the Finder, set in late Republican Rome, starts the reader (if not Gordianus's career, which is well underway when the story opens) off with a bang. A brutal and gory murder, political intrigue, incest, and the introduction of an unknown advocate, one Marcus of the Tullii, named Cicero, make this an exciting introduction to this wily and charming investigator. Decent and honest but cynical and world-weary, Gordianus will appeal to most readers. He's clever, but not too clever, and he may take advantage of the wealthy and corrupt, but he's kind and fair to those less fortunate. A good mystery as well as a good read, the plot keeps twisting right up to the end. I've read this before, but I enjoyed it jsut as much the second (or third?) time around.

In progress:

The Assassination of the Archduke: Sarajevo 1914 and the Romance That Changed the World by Greg King and Sue Woolmans
How Can Man Die Better: The Secrets of Isandhlwana Revealed by Mike Snook
Dunkirk: Retreat to Victory by MG Julian Thompson
Empire of the Mind: A History of Iran by Michael Axworthy
Boer Commando by Denneys Reitz

This would obviously have been credited to last year's account if I had read a little faster, but it does just as well being this year's first completion.

A Murder on the Appian Way is the seventh of Stephen Saylor's Roma Sub Rosa mystery novels, a series set in the waning years of the Roman Republic. In this, the series' protagonist, Gordianus the Finder, is enlisted to find out the circumstances of one of the most famous political murders in the history of the Republic--the killing of Publius Clodius, which sparked riots, the burning of the Senate House, and one of the few instances of martial law in Rome's history (to that date).

Saylor does his usual masterful job with the historical setting. He doesn't work as a professional historian, but he took a doctorate in history and classical studies, and it shows in his keen grasp of the setting and his ability to convey a sense of time and place. Ancient Rome is where these characters live, not just a stage set for a group of modern people in historical costumes to walk and pose. Saylor gives you insights into the larger elements of Roman life (politics, history, the judicial system, social structure and customs) and the smaller ones (food, clothing, transportation, architecture). One of the more interesting sidelights in the story is the Roman legal system and how it was substantially changed at just this time, moving from one in which the principal elements were orations (lasting hours or days) by hired speakers and character testimonies by those who knew the parties but who may have known nothing significant about the actual matter under dispute to a system much more like ours today, where the preponderance of time and attention was spent on witnesses to the actual events in question.

Saylor is also a good writer, and a good mystery writer. His characters are complex and fully realised. His stories aren't simple whodunnits but novels about people who happen to be would up in a mystery. He stands in marked contrast to Laurie King, whose novels I reread from time to time with growing ambivalence. For one thing, he manages to write mysteries in such a way as to supply readers with all the information the detective has, challenging them to make the same deductions and leaps of intuition that the protagonist does (or sometimes fails to); he does not, like King, trot out the explanation at the end, complete with information that the characters never shared with the reader. And most importantly, Saylor has the ability that *so* many other writers, including King, so singularly lack--the ability to include characters familiar to the reader from history (or other fiction) without that painful, unpleasant, self-congratulatory, self-conscious coyness of someone Making a Big Announcement. Saylor treats all his characters as equals, as people, even when their social or potilical standing sets some above others. I think that's why it seems perfectly natural for Gordianus to talk to Cicero, Pompey, Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, and Cato the Younger without it being unconvincing or stilted.

In summary, the writing is good, the plot is excellent (although I didn't guess one of the major plot twists, I was amused that one or two things that had bothered me, little inconsistencies in the different witnesses' narratives, ended up being significant), the characters are appealing: overall a book I would highly recommend if you enjoy mysteries or are interested in the history of Republican Rome.

Current Mood: cold

31. Roma by Steven Saylor. My mother was very fond of Edward Rutherford's historical novels, which are each of them set in a place and track the lives of people there over centuries. I tried one and didn't care for it at all; he didn't strike me as a very good writer.

In Roma, Steven Saylor gives the city of Rome the same treatment, in my opinion to better effect. I like his Roma Sub Rosa novels, detective stories set in the late Republic, very much. This isn't as good (I think I just don't think the whole place-over-time novel idea works very well), but parts of it are engaging, and he does a good job of tracing some of the important events in Roman history and working them into the narrative (it really took me back to my undergrad class in Roman studies). I'd give it a solid three stars out of five.

I need to polish off some of my low-hanging fruit (the half-dozen or so books I've half-read) if I'm going to get close to 50 at this rate...