Centuries Book Reviews Samples For Students

Book Review of Pat Southern’s, The Roman Army: A Social and Institutional History

ABSTRACT
In The Roman Army: A Social and Institutional History, Pat Southern covers over one thousand years of history in which the Roman military evolved from its original base of citizen-soldiers defending a city-state to a force of perhaps one million troops defending far-flung frontiers in Europe, Africa and Asia. She uses a wide variety of historical sources including written records, coins, statuary, and archeological materials, with a good understanding that the surviving information is quite limited, even about the total population of the empire and the size of its legions. Southern’s description of the Roman Army is highly detailed and ...

“This is a book about the positive evidence that evolution is a fact. It is not intended as an anti-religious book. I’ve done that, it’s another T-shirt, this is not the place to wear it again,” says Dr. Richard Dawkins in the introduction to his book The Greatest Show on Earth (17). This book is an organized presentation of copious numbers of the examples that support the evolutionary change over time via the process of natural selection. It raises many issues to a reader’s mind, and it helps provide a fuller understanding of the theory of evolution for the reader. ...

Ecological Imperialism in New England

Abstract:
In 1492, Christopher Columbus landed in “the New World” and marked the beginnings of its extensive colonization. When European settlers arrived in the Americas, they brought with them their cultural values and began to adapt American land to their needs. Those days started ecological imperialism; “wilderness” of the Indian nature was disturbed. European settlers intervened the setting and brought significant changes in flora and fauna as well as the habitual way of living of Native Americans. This paper reveals the long-term consequences of English ecological imperialism in New England and ecological changes brought by European settlers. The main ...

What is the civilizational cycle?

Currently the history of Western civilization is coming through its worst times. It fades gradually for the last hundred years. There is a complete stagnation in the economy and culture. Faith in its future falls, idea of democracy no longer seems so attractive. Science has put forward its response on the matter - a new direction in science has established, which explains the process of cyclical development of civilizations. This science is called biohistory.
Each civilization passes a certain stages or lets call them cycles of development: generation, development, flourishing and fading. From the point of view of biohistory, civilizations tend ...

David Landes book, The Wealth And Poverty Of Nations: why some are so rich and some so poor is arguably the most hotly debated economic book of our time, which seeks to explain the rise of Europe and why some nations easily achieved immense economic success while others continued being mired in poverty. Landes comes out as a witty author who is rich in anecdotal evidence, an astonishing range of intellectual information and a piercing analysis in regard as to why some countries command a substantially amount of wealth and economic supremacy while others have been entangled lives of poverty for centuries. ...

When The Second Sex had been published in 1949, the author of the book Simone de Beauvoir was thirty-seven years old. The Second Sex took the literary market by storm and in just one week, 22,000 copies of the book were sold. Many readers were shocked by the way de Beauvoir frankly discusses the female body and female sexuality. The book was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books by the Vatican (Gray). Why did the society of the time scandalize the content of the book? Why did the de Beauvoir’s book end up breaking all taboos? ...

War is almost as old as human history itself. Even the earliest writings in literature center on conflict: in The Epic of Gilgamesh, the central character goes to the supernatural realm to bring back the secret to eternal life, to bring his friend, who had died in war, back from the grave. The major literary works of ancient Greece either focus on wars between members of two different cultures, as with the Trojan War, or in smaller, more regional conflicts between clans or larger groups: one of the pink elephants in the room for Creon, the regent of Thebes ...

Introduction:

In this seminal book which is around 400 pages long, the author manages to cram a detailed history of the Middle eastern problem from the early years of the 1800’s to the present day. He succinctly manages to combine what occurred in the Colonial period where the Arab peoples were consistently exploited for their rich natural resources while he also manages to keep an open mind on other issues such as the traditions of Islam as well as several intrinsic problems which permeate the area and which have continued to this day.
Essentially Mansfield offers a study of the ...