The most recommended books about the Mediterranean

I came across this book in the early days of writing my own – and it was inspirational.

It’s massive, with 74 chapters, but taken individually these are not in themselves long or difficult reads. We find women of all stations from prostitutes to queens, wet nurses to dancers, and female gladiators introduced, and range in time from the Bronze Age to the Romans.

The authors draw inclusively on multiple approaches and types of evidence, bodies, material culture, iconography, texts, and more. Apart from the vast coverage, the philosophy of the volume as set out by the editors was compelling: to look at ‘real women’ themselves, not mythical women or goddesses, and to emphasize their bodies and names.

It’s a treasure trove for anyone interested in women in the ancient world.

The Birthday Reunion combines the classic elements of a locked room thriller with a look at the dynamics of female friendships, a topic I always find fascinating.

It’s set on an exotic and remote tropical island, with some glamorous characters. I read it on a couple of typically grey days in London, and could almost feel the sunshine. It proves locked room thrillers don’t always have to be set on dark and stormy nights!

This book addresses the well-known issue of refugees who are attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea in order to gain refugee status in Europe, but it does so by adding historical detail that helps us to understand the legal issues pertaining to their flight. Mann links these overloaded vessels filled with desperate peoples to the actions of Jewish migrants to Palestine after WWII, Vietnamese 'boatpeople', Haitian refugees seeking to reach Florida, Middle Eastern migrants and refugees bound to Australia, and Syrian refugees currently crossing the Mediterranean, and then legal responses by states and international organizations to these movements. Along the way, he also helps us to understand the value of reading works by twentieth-century thinkers such as Hannah Arendt and Emmanuel Levinas, and other legal materials to form a rich account of an issue of increasing global concern.

British Intelligence during the First World War is most known for the work of Room 40, which led to the more famous Bletchley Park in the next World War; however, another crucial part of the operation was all the agents in the field that reported to the same man who spearheaded the codebreaking. Those in the Mediterranean were under the command of Charles “the Bold” Thoroton, and this book, written by his granddaughter’s husband, is an enthralling peek into the life of an agent on the ground. From fascinating stories of how unnamed agents found the information the Admiralty was desperate for to being targeted by counter-agent femme fatales, Finding Thoroton reveals information not to be found in any other book, compiled through careful research. A fascinating read.

Author Christopher Castellani stumbled onto quite the rich playground when he first read about the life of Frank Merlo in a book he found in a used bookstore.

The partner of Tennessee Williams for 15 years, Merlo was a working-class New Jersey boy from an Italian family, and a war hero, who also worked as the legendary playwright’s personal assistant during the height of his career. Merlo, however, had creative aspirations of his own. He wanted to be an actor.

Leading Men reimagines the pair’s life together in a griping work of historical fiction. Set in the Italian Riviera in the 1950s, the book pulls back the curtain on their tumultuous relationship, the literary and film circles of 1950s Italy, and the burdens of fame.

Here’s another true story written as a novel, this time an autobiography, which I love. Again, the locations are fantastic,  it’s something of a travelogue, and there’s a strong element of cross-cultural fluidity.

The hero of the book is a Muslim exile from Granada who was brought up in Fez and became an itinerant merchant, journeying through the Sahara and what is now Sudan before settling in Cairo. On his way back to Fez, he was captured by pirates, sent to Rome, converted to Christianity, became a translator and researcher for the Pope, and wrote a description of Africa. Oh, and then he goes back to North Africa and converts back to Islam.

Brilliant!

That Most Precious Merchandise offers a much needed and evocatively-written reassessment of the experience of slavery in the late medieval Mediterranean. Tracing the networks of the slave trade from the Black Sea to Genoa, Venice, and Cairo, it argues that the Italian maritime powers and the Mamluk sultanate shared a similar approach to slavery. By re-assessing Black Sea slavery from the vantage point of both Italy and Egypt, Barker discerns commonalities in systems and approaches to slavery across cultures—she calls this a common culture of slavery. She presents as the principal themes of the book a series of conceptions and practices of slavery that cut across confessional and cultural lines, upending a number of fundamental paradigms that have shaped, and limited, the scholarly terrain. 

This book is an extraordinary synthesis of half a century of history (c. 1520-1571) as European powers and the Ottoman Empire fought for control of the Mediterranean Sea. Empires of the Sea focuses on a number of momentous military engagements, the Siege of Rhodes (1522), the Siege of Malta (1565), the Ottoman conquest of Cyprus (1570-1), and the Battle of Lepanto (1571). Crowley writes like an artist evoking the colors and textures of the brilliant seventeenth-century amid a world of emperors, sultans, popes, and pirates. He manages to capture both the extraordinary individuals who shaped momentous events through their personalities and the broader historical trends that led to the defeat of Ottoman expansion during the 16th century and shaped the contours of Europe as we know it today.

Better known as Amarna Heresy, a philosophical discussion from Ancient Egypt's Babylon about Monotheism and Trinity written 3,000 years ago. “To the King, My Sun, My God, the Breath of My Life…” This remarkable collection contains requests for gold, offers of marriage, warning of a traitor, and promises of loyalty to the pharaoh – letters of correspondence, all written in Akkadian. The Amorite tribes from Babylonia, form part of this correspondence.

Akhenaten 1378 - 1361 BC, was the first Egyptian ruler in history, who has specifically written about Egyptian Gods, a practice usually kept behind the closed doors of the temples. The deity called Aten inspired such devotion in Pharaoh Akhenaten that he built a new capital city which he named ‘Horizon of the Aten’ (modern Amarna), dedicated to the AΘen. He spoke of a deity with no image, an omnipotent God/goddess that emanates aNX, holy spirits, served by… show more.

Written originally for Great Britain, this book (and also Volume II) describes plants that grow outdoors in California's mediterranean climate. You will delight in recognizing old friends and discovering new plants that grow well in our region. There is a photograph of each plant in its native habitat and information on its basic care. An index in Volume II includes the plants in Volume I as well.