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melodyriggs's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.0
This one took me a bit, but I don’t know that you could make a history of such an ancient city shorter. I liked that Clark took the time to explain who some people were and what some of the events were and didn’t just assume I knew them.
lillanaa's review
5.0
A succinct and very well spoken history of one of the first cities, with a good split of time periods. Nothing drags, and although I'm not generally a fan of war history this hits very well during the chapters that I would normally find uninteresting. Despite being hefty, one of the larger books I've found on the topic, this reads quickly and easily, the tone that Clark uses is informative but casual, and this is truly a learning experience I would recommend wholeheartedly.
adamsw216's review
4.0
In Athens: City of Wisdom, Bruce Clark takes us on a whirlwind tour of the history of the titular city from circa 3000 B.C.E. all the way up through 2021 and the COVID-19 pandemic. Naturally, in attempting to cover such a vast swath of history in just ~600 pages, a lot has been omitted. Alexander The Great is practically a footnote in this book. As we careen between eras in history, Clark takes some time to zoom in on particular people and events of note. Specifically, he highlights important figures and moments in politics, war, culture, and archaeology. In spite of the break-neck speed at which we traverse time, Clark manages to paint a fascinating image of a city that has had its fair share of turmoil. Athens is a city that was a major player in the history of Ancient Greece, which brought it widespread notoriety and almost a kind of reverence in the eyes of many visiting dignitaries and conquerors. And even through all of the conflicts and pillaging, Athens and its inhabitants have often taken moments to look back at their own history and attempted to hold on to it. Today, Athens is a very difference place than it was even 100 years ago, but in many ways it continues to embrace its rich heritage, both ancient and more recent.
As much as I enjoyed this book, I think that having a deeper knowledge of the history of Greece through the ages would help a reader have a clearer idea of the importance of particular events and people. The ~600 pages contained within are hardly sufficient to build an effective, unifying narrative thread, though Clark certainly tried. Still, I think the book was successful enough to recommend.
As much as I enjoyed this book, I think that having a deeper knowledge of the history of Greece through the ages would help a reader have a clearer idea of the importance of particular events and people. The ~600 pages contained within are hardly sufficient to build an effective, unifying narrative thread, though Clark certainly tried. Still, I think the book was successful enough to recommend.
markk's review against another edition
informative
reflective
fast-paced
3.75
Bruce Clark is a longtime reporter who spent several years living in and writing about Greece. This experience is at the heart of his book, which offers a lively survey of the history of Athens from its beginnings to the early 21st century. In it he takes an idiosyncratic approach to the city’s history, which proves the source of both the book’s strengths and its greatest flaws.
This approach becomes evident early in the book, with his examination of Athens’s early history. After touching on the myths which form the legend of the city’s origins, he focuses on its emergence into one of the great city-states of the classical era. It is this period which gives Athens its relevancy to history, and Clark soon falls prey to recounting the era in detail. Over a fifth of the text is thus spent detailing less than 250 years of the city’s nearly three-millennia-long existence, which, while highlighting some of Athens’s greatest contributions to our world, can only come at the expense of his coverage of the city’s later centuries.
This becomes evident in the chapters that follow. While Clark’s coverage of the Hellenistic and Roman eras strikes a nice balance between concision and detail, by the time he reaches the medieval era his tour of Athens’s past becomes a sprint. This is in some respects a reflection of our information about these periods, as Athens declined during these years from one of Greece’s greatest city-states into first a Roman-era “theme park of old Greek glory” and then a medieval Balkans backwater. Nevertheless, the imbalance with the earlier chapters renders thirteen centuries of the city’s history and the lives of its inhabitants during those years into filler, and can distort an understanding of how these years shaped the modern city.
This imbalance is only heightened by on what Clark focuses in his chapters on Athens in the early modern era, which is less on the city than on its role in the developing Hellenism of the West. Here he might have done more to consider how this contributed to Athens’s modern revival, as there were few other reasons to move the capital of the newly-established nation of Greece from the port of Nafpilo to an isolated town of 8,000 inhabitants. It was a decision that was key into making Athens into the city it is today, however, as with it came the need to turn it into a place worthy of its new status. Clark does a good job of describing the struggles of this period, as the struggles Greeks faced to develop the town proved a microcosm of their larger issues as a nation, with great ambitions often exceeding limited resources.
This changed only slowly, and often because of larger developments dictated by outsiders. Explaining these developments requires Clark to fit Athens’s history within the history of modern Greece. His narrative is engaging, and as it gets to the present day he is able to inject the additional color provided by his personal knowledge of people and events. In the process, however, Athens itself gets crowded out behind descriptions of key politicians and dramatic national events, making the final chapters less a history of Athens than of contemporary Greece. Like his disproportionate coverage of the classical era, it’s another example of Clark’s idiosyncratic approach to his subject, one that results in an inviting read but ultimately something less than the complete history such a renowned city deserves.
grauspitz's review against another edition
3.0
Not a bad book by any means, but it's less a book on the history of Athens and more a collection of historical anecdotes that happen to have some connection to Athens. You still get some sense of a timeline of Athenian history, but not to the extent that I wanted from the book.
I found that Athens: A History, From Ancient Ideal to Modern City does a better job at actually being a history of Athens, though it's not as up-to-date and stops at the 2004 Olympics. I'd also take that recommendation with a grain of salt, as I read Waterfield's book back in 2015.
I found that Athens: A History, From Ancient Ideal to Modern City does a better job at actually being a history of Athens, though it's not as up-to-date and stops at the 2004 Olympics. I'd also take that recommendation with a grain of salt, as I read Waterfield's book back in 2015.
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