The most recommended books about Alexander the Great

This is a book about books, and as a lover of books, I loved it!

A history of the book may sound like a dry topic, but this was anything but dry. It is most beautifully written, and the style transported me to so many places throughout recorded history, as well as to my own childhood and my relationship with the printed word.

In addition to illuminating the catalytic role this humble invention played in shaping human civilization, it also highlights its far-reaching implications for today’s and tomorrow’s society. From dictators to revolutionaries and from book bans to copyright laws, books have become tools in power struggles, for better and for worse, thanks to their ability to transform our intellectual, emotional, and social world.

While I didn’t find nearly enough about the Great Egyptian Revolt of 200 BCE or Ankhmakis’s plight in this book, it was an excellent resource for creating the day-to-day life of ancient Egypt.

From house building to boat designs to farming on the river, as well as the rise and fall of the various dynasties and their idiosyncrasies, Wilkinson’s book is a must read for any Egyptophile such as myself. Without it, I don’t think I would have been able to have envisioned Ankhmakis’s world the way I have.

This book has beautiful illustrations and completely covers the history of both European and native conceptions of the North Pole from the ancient times to the present day in just 254 pages.

People believed the most amazing things about the North Pole in the past, including that it was an ice-free fruitful paradise! Why? 

Do we really need another book of world history? Yes, We needed this one.

Montefiore tells the story of human society through a number of carefully selected families and their relationships, thereby connecting the intimate with the geopolitical, trivia with statesman craft, family with empire.

The author is an excellent storyteller and a reliable witness. He comes across as someone you would want to share a cognac with by the fireplace. Naturally, he tells stories that had to be left out of the book. 

Melissa Scott has written the best “What would’ve happened if Alexander didn’t die?” alternate history. It’s a popular question among historians, but usually assumes he survived his final illness. Scott takes a different tack, choosing instead to diverge some years before his death. Here, he returns from Asia to put down a revolt in Greece. After that, he goes west, against first Rome, then Carthage. Although the characters aren’t as fleshed out as in some of her later military SF (this was an early work), her grasp of military maneuvers and politics, for which she would later earn attention, is on full display. It’s a viable tale of what might have happened, had Alexander decided to take on Rome, or Carthage, at that point in their histories.

The late Christian Habicht was one of the foremost authorities on Hellenistic Greece. His book is both a synthesis of his research and publications on this period and an incisive and in-depth narrative of Athens down to 30 BC, anchored in the ancient, especially inscriptional, evidence. He shows among other things how Athens remained a vital city in Greece and how its intellectual and social life continued to flourish but how limited its democracy was. Habicht’s book could not take into account recent and much-needed epigraphical publications of the city’s major state decrees and laws and new insights into chronology, but it is still an indispensable read.

For millennia, people have been obsessed with borders, drawing them, reinforcing them, fighting over them, and moving them. In this timely essayistic account, Crawford explores borders’ important role in moulding our planet and their continued significance for people and wildlife worldwide.  

Many associate borders with exclusion and unwelcome, and Crawford does not shy away from censuring some of the world’s most flagrant examples. However, the main reason I enjoyed The Edge of the Plain is the nuance it provides with respect to how a border is experienced and what is even considered a border. As some of his interviewees explain, a border can be imposed on people to obstruct them, but it can also be created by marginalised communities to defend themselves from existential threats such as climate change.

I read this book just before I started writing my own book on Buddhism and Ireland. It’s almost an adventure story: there’s Alexander the Great and Aesop’s Fables, Marco Polo and Theosophist fantasies, Christian missionaries to Asia and Buddhist missionaries to the West, Asian immigrants in America, and British spies in Tibet, the Dalai Lama, and today’s western Buddhists. Sutin tells this whole complicated, rambling yarn in an easy-going and enjoyable way, making the book a real pleasure to read.

The city of Alexandria was founded by Alexander the Great, or at least named in his honour. And Alexander the Great is responsible for wiping out other fabled cities. Most notably, the ancient Persian city of Persepolis, located in modern-day Iran. Finally, a place you can actually visit! But the massive palace lies in ruins, nowhere near its original splendour with all the statuary and furnishings, and the pomp and majesty of Persia’s kings and courtiers—at the time when Persia was a global superpower.

Around 2,000 years ago, Alexander the Great’s troops looted Persepolis and burned it to the ground. And there it lay in the sand, forgotten, until the site was revived in the 1930s and somewhat restored. The site lies in southwest Iran and was inscribed to the World Heritage List in 1979.  Given that travel to Iran today is fraught with obstacles, this book about Persepolis could… show more.

Any recommendation list of novels about Alexander must include Mary Renault, queen of Greek historical fiction. Fire from Heaven covers his childhood/youth and remains many readers’ initial introduction to him. Her knowledge of Greece, both the land and its history, is rich, and she was first to depict, in a positive way, Alexander’s relationship with Hephaistion as more than friendship. Ironically, the book’s publication coincided with the NYC Stonewall Riots in June of 1969. Yet however progressive her view of homoerotic attachments, she paints a troublingly misogynistic portrait of Alexander’s mother Olympias. The book contains a few errors as several critical archaeological discoveries were 10+ years in the future, but historical novelists can’t be faulted for forthcoming finds. Her second novel about Alexander, The Persian Boy, was published in 1972.