Thoroughly researched and sprightly ... The book’s only serious failing is that it’s occasionally abrupt, skipping about from place to place too quickly.
Terrifically readable and deeply researched ... By turns authoritative, witty and revelatory, The Missing Thread feels like a book for our times and for all time.
The problem with the book is that although it promises history "through" women, one look at the footnotes and you will see that pretty much all the source material is written by men ... Fortunately Dunn does try to do more. One nice touch is that she starts each chapter with a few lines of poetry written by a female author that has survived from antiquity ... And it is when the book moves beyond the great women approach, into social history, using the medical, legal, archaeological and visual records, that it becomes more interesting.
In a deft survey of the contours of the classical world, elegantly stitched together into a narrative that weaves through 3,000 years of history, Dunn offers a much-needed addition to standard histories that include only the men ... But one might ask how such a narrative, where women are woven through the exploits of emperors and kings, ends up amplifying and reinscribing traditional male histories; or whether the sources on which such a history leans – overwhelmingly from the male text-based tradition – are unreliable witnesses to women.
Some parts of [Dunn's] claim that [women] shaped the ancient world ring true ... In The Missing Thread, Daisy Dunn shows us once again why all children should learn about ancient civilisations: because they provide great stories that are powerful and always fresh and relevant.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
