"I regret buying this book" Topic

Between my job, kids, and wife, I don't get a lot of time for reading. I have subscriptions to several magazines which takes up some of my limited leisure time, so I don't get to read too many books. Because of this I've gotten in the habit over the last few years of ordering from Osprey when they have their annual sale. I get to read numerous bite size books that cover lots of different periods that I enjoy.

On my last order back in November, (I told you I don't get a lot of reading time), I made the mistake of buying 'The Hydaspes 326 BC' by Nic Fields. Years ago I got his book on the Third Crusade, (I believe), and have avoided him as an author ever since. I didn't look at the authors of the books I bought this time, so the fault is mine.

Since I bought it I decided to read it since I find Alexander and his campaigns interesting. Here are my issues in no particular order:

1) He uses spellings I am not familiar with for people and places I am familiar with. Dareios for Darius, Boukephalas for Bucephalus, Granikos for Granicus, etc. I realize translations may be changing, (the way Peking is now Beijing both for the same word), so this could be just because I'm old and cranky.

2) He uses words I'm fairly certain he made up. For example he refers to people who are, for want of a better term, pro-Alexander as Heroizers.

3) Reading his terrible prose it becomes clear very quickly that he's trying to pump up his word count. I'm assuming Osprey has a contract that calls for a certain number of words for a book and he's pumping up his count because that's the only way to reach the needed word count.

4) His writing style is very pompous. For example, this is the first paragraph about Alexander in the Opposing Commanders section:

"There are strong views on Alexander III of Macedon (born 356 BC, r. 336-2323 BC) There were back at the time, and they still are, and the polarizing adoration and antagonism inspires means most military historians (and fellow ‘military geniuses', to use a term first coin by Clausewitz) have their own Alexander. Each of these men, and invariably they are men, has his own perspective, not to say, prejudices, and truth, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder. There are three competing schools of thought when it comes to Alexander, but that does not distract from the fact that a view of him, that is one-sided is bound to have missed the truth. That said, whether we choose to magnify his achievements and diminishes faults – for the revisionists, this is akin to carefully pruning the branches of Alexander's biography – for the heroizers such dreary, cynicism is like casting aspersions on a saint – or take up the middle ground amid the hero, and the anti-hero, there are characteristics of the controversial figure that cannot be disputed."

I got lost in his convoluted style and had to reread the paragraph to figure out what he was trying to say.

5) He throws in unnecessary politically correct comments in his books. Such statements include, "Each of these men, and invariably they are men,…" What does that add to the story being told?

6) In this paragraph he says, "There are three competing schools of thought when it comes to Alexander…" but he never lays out clearly what the three schools of thought are.

7) He takes a quote from JRR Tolkien out of context to try and illustrate a point about Alexander, "Unsurprisingly, to quote JRR Tolkien, 'History became legend. Legend became myth'.

I'm going to try and read this book because I'm interested in the topic. However, if it becomes as tedious as I expect it will, I'll set it aside. Life's too short to waste on reading bad books. Either way, come the next Osprey sale I'll be sure to check the names of the authors before I order anything.

Just my thoughts.

The spellings are 'alternative' transliterations of the Classical Greek. Irksome, but easy to decipher in context.

Heroiser is a French verb "to make a hero of". A valid word, but not in English so rather pointless.

Every historian I've read is guilty of pomposity and prolix to some extent.

Thanks DJ

"The earliest known use of the verb heroize is in the late 1600s. OED's earliest evidence for heroize is from 1695, in the writing of P. Hume." (from oed.com)

So it looks valid as an English word to me.

The Greek spelling system Fields uses is closer to a literal rendering of the Greek characters, not the Latinized versions – rendering the Greek letter kappa as k instead of c, for instance. It's a more "accurate" rendering of the original in a pedantic letter-for-letter sense, but it's also a better guide to pronunciation – stops you reading Bucephalas as Busephalas, for instance (because when the Romans started spelling Greek words with a c they still pronounced it as a hard c, whereas c in English can be hard or soft…).

I do agree with you about Fields padding out this volume, though, and to make it worse I'm not entirely sold on his version of the Macedonian order of battle, either.

Thanks GurKhan, I stand corrected on 'heroize'. I note that my spell checker says it's not a word and nothing came up when I googled it. Perhaps it would be considered archaic?

The spelling/pronunciation thing makes a lot of sense and tilts me towards liking it more. I just find it jarring after having read it one way for so long. Indeed, I've been pronouncing Bucephalas incorrectly. Even though I took Latin in high school and should have known better. That said, I'm a Southerner and don't necessarily pronounce Englis correctly most of the time.

I appreciate your thoughts on the book. You know far, far more about Ancients than I do and I'm glad I'm not just being an ass. I haven't made it to the actual campaign yet.

While Field's system is more accurate for Greek, I've never quite gotten the point of using it for Persian (and Median, etc.) names. If you want to be accurate, transliterate Darius' name from the Old Persian spelling used in inscriptions (which yields something like Darayavaush).

Just some general comments that I've noticed recently.

I honestly HATE (only for emphasis!) when people who supposedly speak/write English (colleagues of mine – professors do this constantly) use French! What is the point of this – to show you speak French? If it's a French author, no problem but if you are a professor of English/an English writer, USE English, for goodness sakes!

Regarding the PC crap – I've noticed this style in various recently published so-called 'military' titles. I'm guessing the people who use this kind of pseudo-language/babble are younger and not of my generation of historian.

Thanks for the honest book review. I was thinking of doing one for "Henchmen of Ares" but that book is so useless, my parrots wouldn't even crap on it!

I also face limited reading time. I choose my books carefully and also agree that Osprey make some really good quick hit books when I want to take a break from the more ponderous tomes.

I will not waste time on something it don't enjoy and have dropped a title from the collection when it is clear I will not enjoy the read.

There was one on the East Front that turned into a dry listing of at least five higher level units (corp and above) on each short paragraph. It was donated the the local library association in the yearly purge.

"While Field's system is more accurate for Greek, I've never quite gotten the point of using it for Persian (and Median, etc.) names. If you want to be accurate, transliterate Darius' name from the Old Persian spelling used in inscriptions (which yields something like Darayavaush)."

Must admit I took a similar line back in AMPW – stick to Darius because it's no worse than Dareios!

Thank you for this post. I thought the same thing about this book. It was a major effort to finish it.

I actually enjoyed this book. It went beyond just the Hydadpes Battle. It piqued my interest in Classical India and its contact with the Macedonians/Greeks.

The author I find tedious is David Nicolle. He always spends 1/3 of his book talking about armor. And he is very dry.

I have long since decided that life is too short to read books one has to wade through the words. I used to finish everything, just becasue. But i found, more and more, people cannot write decently anymore. I have just about stopped reading modern science fiction as so much of it is derivative, and badly written. I've now seen more history books written in "intelligensia". This quote reads like it was translated from a foreign language to me. I don't know if it is due to publishers no longer using copy editors, or editors at all, but genius that is not readable, is just crap.

I was going to suggest that the excerpt had been generated by AI, but the appalling grammar makes that unlikely.

Transliterating Greek into English has always been fraught -- the norm used to be to stick to established, Latinized versions (Alexander and not Alexandros, Plato not Platon, Aeschylus not Aiskhylos, Homer not Homeros, and so on). But in recent times it has become fashionable for academics and those wishing to be seen as academics to revert to very Hellenic versions of such nomenclature, which I agree can be very jarring, esp. for those not exposed before to Greek. The same for pronunciation, which is also very fugitive, since ancient Greek was pronounced different from modern Greek and most of what we say is an Anglicized version of a Latinized version of the Greek originals anyway.

It's almost impossible to write or speak in English and be utterly consistent, so I think it is foolish and pointless to even try. We are always compromising unless we want to become pedantic. Does anyone really say "See-Kee-eel'-ah" for Sicily? Do we say "Makk-a-don'-ya" or "Mass-a-DOEN'-ee-a?" "So-kraat'-ess" for Socrates?

General usage is best served by the traditional English pronunciations of these old names, realizing that we have inherited our speech from older standards and bearing in mind that church Latin (the "vulgate") that shaped much of our English usages preferred to soften the "c" when followed by the vowels "e" and "i". Greek did not/does not. If you visit Greece, by all means pick up on the modern Greek pronunciations and stresses (frequently the penultimate syllable, which again is very different from English or Latin). But understand your audience when speaking.

PS: watch the 1962 movie "The 300 Spartans" to see some of these inconsistencies in action. The film was shot in Greece and employed many Greek actors in small parts, and being in the country obviously influenced some of the dialogue coaches, because you can hear names being pronounced in all manner of ways, from modern Greek to traditional Anglicized forms. E.g., usually "Lee-oh-NEE-das" (proper Greek) but sometimes (from the Brits especially) "Lee-OHN-ah-das."

There are others, too. "Ev-RO'-tas" river, that's Greek, must have been learned on set from a native. Typically an English-speaker seeing this in the script would say "Yoo-roh'-tas".

"So-Crates" was a very funny joke when you know what's what!

I find that using French adds a certain je ne sait quoi

πολύ καλά

"I find that using French adds a certain je ne sait quoi"

Or even je ne sais quoi

DJ, thanks for your views. I normally love osprey books so it is disappointing to hit a dud.

Joe

"I honestly HATE (only for emphasis!) when people who supposedly speak/write English (colleagues of mine – professors do this constantly) use French! What is the point of this – to show you speak French? If it's a French author, no problem but if you are a professor of English/an English writer, USE English, for goodness sakes!"

Fields does a variant of this in this book. He'll put the name of an ancient book in translated Greek then in parentheses directly behind in the name of the book in English. I too find this highly annoying.

French sucks.English rules.

Hey when I was like 10 in 1987 and walked into my small primary school's library in Canberra Australia I found Ospreys on:

a)NATO amphibious assault doctrine (in like early '80s)

AND

b)US Army infantry platoon/squad assaulting a farm house in France in like 1944 (that was filthy with Kraut defenders)

Those books indocrinated me as a nerd and military fan. Precluded from actually joining the military due to bad eyesight/general dorkness, I see these volumes as key to my current state as a full-time dork.

Would anyone have links to exactly what these volumes may be? Tanks you.!

I think all history these days has to be politically correct, as it always has been just different politics as it will be in the future when it will be different politics from now (hopefully )just think BC /AD and BCE and whatever took the place of AD.
Alexander the Great apparently thought he was a god the son of Zeus , that might of influenced his decisions , he's history , literally . Even if back in his time we had all of the blessings of intense media cover , live video etc would we be any the wiser , we don't understand the motives of politicians of today never mind thousands of years ago.
Read a book and enjoy or not enjoy it for the sake of reading a book , reading many books only means that and that only that many books have been read and there is learning and pleasure in that , but it may not bring you any nearer to what actually occurred l enjoy history , especially first hand accounts , Caesars Gallic wars etc not because it's brings me to understand what actually happened but because l get to hear what an authentic ancient wants me to believe what happened , even them some would claim that the text is corrupt .

Yes, Jefthro, all history in the West needs to be politically correct now. Everywhere else? Nope.

Again. I rather enjoyed the book.

"I think all history these days has to be politically correct, as it always has been just different politics as it will be in the future when it will be different politics from now (hopefully )just think BC /AD and BCE and whatever took the place of AD."

I think you're mixing up "point of view" [which all historians MUST have, or we can't understand the purpose of the scholarship in their book] with politically correct / woke speech. To say "Each of these men, and invariably they are men,…" is putting forward that the mere fact of their being male in sex is a negative, so a sexist judgement upon them.

In actuality, the person at fault is Nic Fields, isn't it, for not providing a couple of female ancient scholars to quote? It took me 2 minutes to find the below list of 311 women scholars, four of whom list Alexander the Great as an area of expertise.
link

Nic Fields you chauvanist!!
Where's your quote from Jeanne Reames, Christelle Fischer-Bovet, Stephanie Langin-Hooper, or Alexandra F. Morris??

What would make this hilarious is if the women have succombed to the sort of hero-worship that he criticizes.
:)