Mateo's review
Gibbon's the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
by Moses Hadas
She's hiding in the video section of the library looking for a more entertaining film version of this book (Gladiator?).
Mateo's review
Gibbon's the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Moses Hadas
Mateo's review
rating:
Not without reason is Gibbon considered one of the masters of prose style in English. His elegant, supple, and nuanced writing has influenced writers in English for hundreds of years. (Churchill, for example, was an impassioned devotee who used Gibbon's style to burnish his own writing.)
So call me a Philistine, call me uneducated, call me a cab, but I found this book to be, frankly, tedious. Yes, Gibbon's sly, understated manner can be a marvel of polished prosody, but it can also be rococo and impenetrable. (It's no coincidence that Gibbon reminds me of no one so much as the late journalist Murray Kempton, whose prose--probably derived from equal parts Gibbon and Damon Runyon--was equally outfitted with serpentine bangles, although Kempton mostly wrote about mobsters and pugs.) On numerous occasions I found myself rereading paragraphs simply to figure out what Gibbon's subject was. Is he talking about the Goths? The Romans? The plebeians? Who knows? On to the next para...more
So call me a Philistine, call me uneducated, call me a cab, but I found this book to be, frankly, tedious. Yes, Gibbon's sly, understated manner can be a marvel of polished prosody, but it can also be rococo and impenetrable. (It's no coincidence that Gibbon reminds me of no one so much as the late journalist Murray Kempton, whose prose--probably derived from equal parts Gibbon and Damon Runyon--was equally outfitted with serpentine bangles, although Kempton mostly wrote about mobsters and pugs.) On numerous occasions I found myself rereading paragraphs simply to figure out what Gibbon's subject was. Is he talking about the Goths? The Romans? The plebeians? Who knows? On to the next para...more
She's hiding in the video section of the library looking for a more entertaining film version of this book (Gladiator?).