Reviews and Comments

I've decided to add the merchant marine to the list of industries where I'd rather not work. Shipping stuff by sea has become incredibly cheap, and the quality of life on board container ships has suffered as their owners have looked to cut costs as much as possible.

This is combined with the unethical but totally legal practice of choosing your own country of origin (with most companies choosing the ones with the least cost and/or oversight), which leaves the crew at the mercy of uncaring legal systems when they're stiffed by their employers.

Turnaround times while in port have shortened to less than a day, meaning that shore leave is short when the crew gets any at all. Maersk (and other companies) forbids families (due to piracy), drinking (for obvious reasons), and plenty of other things that would make a seafaring life less monotonous.

I knew most of this before reading the book, but I was happy to see it fleshed out.

If I enjoyed the book, why'd I give it three stars? The content felt padded out. The journey itself could have been a long article. The piracy chapter was way too long, as were some of the other non-narrative portions of the book. It was worth my $2, but it would have benefited from substantial trimming.

My gosh this was a slog! Six books of 600+ pages each. It was definitely worth the effort, though. I must admit that the level of detail was daunting, but the patterns that such detail exhibited the rhyming history that Mark Twain remarked upon.

I have neither the time nor the inclination to comprehensively rate the series. My favorite aspects of the series are the comprehensive research against primary sources (I gave up trying to read the footnotes after about the second book) and the double-history perspective of a late-18th-century writer examining Roman and Byzantine history. This is an impressive feat of scholarship!

Another motivation for my reading the series was to fill the gaps of my understanding of this massive span of time. Naturally, the interminable list of emperors' names blended together after a while, but the sweep of the narrative will guide me when I next encounter these names, times, and places. The podcast Hardcore History had already done a pretty comprehensive job covering the Mongolian Empire, so it was satisfying to see that narrative mesh with Gibbon's description of the period. I expect this will happen many times over the course of my future reading.

If you're interested in the history of Western Civilization, I'd recommend putting in the effort to read the entire series. Although I found the level of detail to be tedious at times, I am glad that I persevered.