by: Eric H. Cline
Read: February 2026
Bookshop Link: https://bookshop.org/a/17533/9780691208015
My Short Summary
A short but dense summary to the events leading up to the collapse of the Late Bronze Age.
My Short Take
This was by no means an easy read, but the author did a remarkable job of making much of it feel accessible to someone who knows literally nothing about antiquity.
Some Thoughts
This was one of the more difficult books I’ve read in quite some time. Not difficult to get through so much, just difficult sometimes from sentence to sentence because it was so laden with unfamiliar names and places. Once I accepted that I was never going to remember them all or even follow them all, I eased up on the reading process and sort of just tried to follow the key threads, and I began to enjoy it quite a bit.
What I took away more than anything was the humbling reminder of just how fleeting a human life is, and how all the stuff we get riled up about on a day to day basis is not unique … not to us as individuals, and not to our time period.
I walked away with a clearer understanding of what happened in 1177, yes, but also a very comforting sense of perspective about my own life, as well as the world at large.
A strange side effect of reading this book was a decrease in my tolerance for listening to other people whining about “the state of things” (politics, AI, family drama, industry gossip, whatever issue is outraging them at the moment). Yes, the current world is full of shit. But there has always been shit, there will always be shit. Just like here has always been good, there will always be good. It comes down to where you choose to focus your attention, what you chose to your oh-so-few precious trips around the sun: outrage … or action.
Recommended for
If you’re new to nonfiction reading, this might not be the place to start as it’s fairly densely packed with minutia and new terminology. But if you have even a twinkling of interest about antiquity or just seeing humanity on a much larger scale than current events and recent history, highly recommend.
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