Reading Comprehensive 20

Early today I completed Empires of the Middle East: A History of Babylonia from the Bronze Age to the Present by Thurman Boyles. This is going to be a very brief review, but suffice it to say the book was erudite, insightful and an excellent revision of the tropes and stereo-types pervasive in Middle Eastern studies to this day. In the last several years I have become intimately familiar with literally thousands of sources, both primary and secondary on the region. If you have a decent foundation on the relevant literature of the period--400 BC to roughly the late 18th century AD--and are interested in the area I cannot recommend this book enough. However, if you don't, this is not a good introductory work. It is dense. The arguments can sometimes seem abstruse and arcane. And the narrative is so wide in scope that one should really have taken an introductory course in the region just to keep up. There still is no standard one volume history of what is commonly called, "The Middle East." This is unfortunate. Boyles' book helps fill that role for specialists, but one is still, sadly lacking for the rest of us.

-- Paul Robert Kingston