The sea as it was

I haven't mentioned that a few months ago I read an incredible book, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean. It weighs in at ~650 pages of dense narrative text, and you'll want to jump to the footnotes as well! There isn't much I can say in this space that would do justice to the book, the author has produced a tour de force of macrohistory. As someone with more scholarly tastes in history and culture I have noticed a definite bias toward monographs on my part. Too often generalist tomes are superficial surveys; no author can command all of the literature, and Wikipedia has truly replaced many of the entry-level works. The Great Sea has some of the typical problems with broad sweeping histories, but they're usually evident only in closer inspection of footnotes (there seems a particular weakness in prehistory and far antiquity). But ultimately this ...