TBR Jar Review: The Seventy Great Inventions of the Ancient World edited by Brian M. Fagan

This was my last pick out of my TBR jar, and while I did enjoy it, it did take me a good while to finish. I originally put this book in the jar/on my TBR list because I enjoy lists of things and I love archaeology and history. 

This book is a great resource for the beginner, or for one who is just casually interested in ancient history and the like. I did find that some of the topics were a bit large, considering they had to handled within 2-6 pages. “Houses” and “Cereal Agriculture” for example gave a very cursory introduction to the topic at hand, which is understandable as these are huge issues. The book also covers (or tries to) the entire world, so presenting houses in China, Egypt, The Middle East, Europe and the Americas only leaves a very small space for each area and/or time period. 

I do think most of the entries managed quite well to give a short introduction and suggestions for further reading are given at the back of the book for each topic, so if you want to study something in more detail, you have easy access to suggested material. I found only a few of the entries to be misses, in particular “Horses and Horse Equipment” and “Handmills, Watermills and Pumps”, because these were just too technical for me. In such a short space you cannot go into the finer details of engineering for example, and you shouldn’t, but I found that these articles in particular were too technical and I thought they could have been “dumbed down” a bit or taken a different approach and gone for the simpler sides of the issue. 

In general I enjoyed the book and as I said above, I think it is a great introduction to a lot of topics. I gave it 3,5 stars out of 5 on Goodreads. 

Next up from my TBR Jar is “Travels With My Aunt” by Graham Greene. It doesn’t really sound like the kind of thing I would normally read, but it’s good to get out of your comfort zone now and again.