A review by fetterov
How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower, by Adrian Goldsworthy

informative medium-paced

3.0

I was excited to read this book after devouring Goldworthy's wonderful biographies of Caesar and Augustus, but I thought it missed the mark a bit. The decline and fall of the western Roman Empire is, of course, one of the most written about and studied aspects of human history. I enjoy Goldsworthy's brand of scholarship that takes a skeptical eye to popular assumptions and isn't afraid to admit when we simply don't know something. However, the devil was in the details in this volume -- as in there were, at times, too many. The first section of the book on the third century gets totally bogged down in names of emperors, generals, and the important women in their lives. It was too fast-paced for me to be able to follow. The book got a bit more focused as it went onto the fourth and fifth centuries, but it felt more like a compressed narrative of 300 years of Roman history rather than details about how it fell. I wish he would've taken more time to focus on broad topics and trends about the decline and fall of Rome rather than telling us in detail about, for example, the reigns of Constantine and his successors. The blitz of names made this book feel dense and hard to follow. If you want a quick and dirty history of the Roman empire from Marcus Aurelius to Augustulus, you'll be happy with this work, but perhaps not if you want something truly focused on Rome's fall.