About this title: A modern abridgment of what is perhaps the greatest history ever written, Edward Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire."
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: G.P. PUTNAM'S SONS
Date Published: 1962
Description: Very Good in None jacket. 1962 G.P. Putnam's Sons (NY). Missing dustjacket. Black cloth with gilt spine printing. Initials and date very small in corner of endpaper and a small amount of foxing on top page edges. Otherwise tight and clean, with square binding, sharp corners. 320 pages. read more
Edition: Book Club Edition.
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Putnam, New York
Date Published: 1962
ISBN-13:9780449300565ISBN:0449300560
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. 320pgs. 8vo hardcover with dust jacket. Book Club Edition with original owner's name inked. Clean text with firm binding. Near fine condition black boards with gilt lettering. No dust jacket tears, light overall wear from shelving. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Fawcett, New York
Date Published: 1987
ISBN-13:9780449300565ISBN:0449300560
Description: Good. 12mo-over 6¾"-7¾" tall. 311pp. Paperback in good condition, very minor wear. This is the Modern Abridgement by Moses Hadas. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace & Co
Date Published: 1960-01-01
Description: Very Good. Hardcover book in very good condition, clean and tightly bound. Corners are bumped. Ships next business day from Oklahoma. read more
Binding: Hardback with Dust Wrapper.
Publisher: BCA [Book Club Associates-Guild Publishing]
Date Published: 1974
Description: Very Good. in Worn jacket. Wrapper has considerable edge wear and chipping. Pages beginning to yellow. 924pp including bibliography, chronology and comprehensive index. Map endpapers. read more
Edition: Second Edition
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Book Club Associates, London
Date Published: 1979
Description: Very Good + in Very Good + jacket. 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" Tall. 924 pp. dj with title on front cover, red edging to top edge; vg clean text. read more
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Fawcett Books
Date Published: 1987
ISBN-13:9780449300565ISBN:0449300560
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Mass market (rack) paperback. Glued binding. 336 p. Audience: General/trade. Very good rack paperback in square, tight, unmarked condition. Some slight edge wear and corner fray to cover; minimal spine crease. Carefully wrapped, and shipped in a durable mailer by a conscientious seller. read more
"Not without reason is Gibbon considered one of the masters of prose style in English. His elegant, supple, and nuanced writing has influenced writers in English for hundreds of years. (Churchill, for example, was an impassioned devotee who used Gibbon's style to burnish his own writing.)
So call me a Philistine, call me uneducated, call me a cab, but I found this book to be, frankly, tedious. Yes, Gibbon's sly, understated manner can be a marvel of polished prosody, but it can also be rococo and impenetrable. (It's no coincidence that Gibbon reminds me of no one so much as the late journalist Murray Kempton, whose prose--probably derived from equal parts Gibbon and Damon Runyon--was equally outfitted with serpentine bangles, although Kempton mostly wrote about mobsters and pugs.) On numerous occasions I found myself rereading paragraphs simply to figure out what Gibbon's subject was. Is he talking about the Goths? The Romans? The plebeians? Who knows? On to the next paragraph!
Thus, even with this extremely truncated abridgment, my enthusiasm began to flag after a hundred or so pages and I barely dragged myself across the finish line, unable to remember one dictator from another or, for that matter, to care. It didn't help that the book pales by my modern standards of historiography; it's highly tendentious, idiosyncratic, and poorly referenced.
So, yes, I am a Philistine. Now, where's Phyllis?"
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