Back
William Manchester: A world lit only by fire (1993, Little, Brown) 3 stars

William Manchester's A World Lit Only by Fire is the preeminent popular history of civilization's …

Review of 'A world lit only by fire' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

Best viewed as a work of historical fiction , this book is riddled with inaccuracies and falsehoods along with sometimes wild assertions delivered as fact by a writer who covers his dishonest tracks by admitting in his own author's notes that the work does not aspire to any sort of scholarship. There is little, if any, original research here and the secondary sources used are often distorted to satisfy the writer's sometimes quite strange interpretations of historical events. Yet some academics and the public at large ate up this work, which amounts to literary and intellectual empty carbs -- it tastes great but is ultimately bad for you.