PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksBeard is at her best when she overlays the testimony of Roman authors with her interpretation of the archaeological remains of the structures they describe ... Emperor of Rome offers a series of interesting vignettes presented by a masterful storyteller with a perfect sense of dramatic and comic timing. Beard knows how to introduce the lives and work of unfamiliar characters in a fashion that concisely provides both general historical background and intricate detail about their actions ... Despite the excellent qualities of this book, and it has a great many, I fear that Emperor of Rome represents something of a missed opportunity to speak more broadly to the crisis the field of classics now faces.
Thomas E. Ricks
PositiveLos Angeles Review of Books... a delightfully written, fast-paced, and intellectually sophisticated group biography of our first four presidents. Ricks chose a fruitful point of entry into the minds that shaped our nation. Instead of looking at the written work of mature political thinkers struggling to piece together a state during and after the American Revolution, Ricks focuses on the intellectual formation of our first four presidents ... focusing again on the public good, rewarding public virtue, and revitalizing Congress. Embracing such changes can, Ricks hopes, allow us to salvage \'the American experiment\' that our first four presidents treasured. I fear that these recommendations do not go far enough to address the real challenges our republic faces ... Ricks offers no good solutions for America’s terrifying new politics of intimidation, though I suspect few can fault him for this.
