history reviews – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

Looking at this cover, what would you say the title of the book is? Because before I get into the actual book, I want to talk about this cover. I had this book on my wish list at Amazon for a while before I got around to ordering it, and this is the cover of the first hardback edition. The version I have looks like this, and is just titled Agrippina: A Biography of the Most Extraordinary Woman in the Roman World. The “Empress/Exile/Hustler/Whore” text of the original cover is gone, which makes me wonder if that was always just supposed to be a text element of the cover or if they actually retitled the book when they released it in paperback. Either way, this cover is nowhere to be found any longer, and in fact, actual copies of the hardback are going for hundreds of dollars right now.

There are several reasons, it seems, why I wish I had ordered and read this book much earlier than I did. I feel like this shouldn’t be true, but it is: it has been hard for me to find books about Rome and the Romans that aren’t paralyzingly boring, and this book even employs the traditional Pegasus font, which I absolutely associate with dreary, charmless older works of history, usually ones that were released in half a dozen 500-page volumes. You might as well.

You will hold on to that impression for only a very small number of pages, and then you’ll hit a passage like this:

I defy you to find any other history book, other than perhaps another of Emma Southon’s works, that uses the word spunking. And I will tell you right now that if that sentence brought a smile to your face, and if you have even the slightest interest in the subject matter of this book, you should hie thee to a bookstore immediately (perhaps a used one, to see if they have a hardback) and grab a copy, because this is easily the most profane and irreverent work of history I’ve ever encountered, and it’s surprisingly refreshing to read. Also, Emma Southon kinda loathes Suetonius, and her ongoing vendetta against a historian who has been dead for close to two thousand years is absolutely hilarious. But there is an amazing amount of profanity in this book, so just be prepared for that.

It’s not as if Agrippina, who was sister to Caligula, wife (and niece, because Romans were creeps) to Claudius, and mother to Nero, really needs the help. I’m fairly certain a lesser writer would have been able to put together a passable biography of her, y’know? That subtitle isn’t a joke; Agrippina was basically the only female Empress of Rome and was an absolutely fascinating person to read about. Southon is impressively adept at navigating the complexities of 1st-century Rome in a way that make things clear for the nonspecialist, which I should make clear that I absolutely am– my religious studies degrees overlap temporally with her tenure but are a continent away, so I’m gonna get lost a lot in the hands of a less clear writer. The book is clearly aimed at the non-historian audience, too, and ends up being a pretty effective primer on Roman culture and the early history of the Empire as well. I tore through it in a day, and it’s gonna be on my list at the end of the year– the only question is how high, and to be honest I can imagine a world where this is the first nonfiction book to sit at the top of the list when I write my Best Books of 2025 post. Again, if you’ve got even the tiniest amount of interest in the subject matter and her let’s-be-euphemistic-and-call-it-earthy language isn’t going to get to you, grab it sooner rather than later.

I’m trying to decide which overused sentence I should start this post with, and I can’t make a decision.

Because unfortunately, while I haven’t read this book before, I feel like I’ve written this post before. Dava Sobel’s excellent Galileo’s Daughter is a biography of a genius, and, well, I think you probably already know if you want to read a really good biography of Galileo. The title makes it sound like a thousand different literary fiction novels– there are so many The So-and-So’s Daughter novels out there that I’m surprised that there isn’t a parody of them with that exact title– but no, this book is at least a third or so about Suor Maria Celeste, Galileo’s oldest daughter, through the prism of the surprisingly large corpus of letters we have from her to him. Suor Maria was a cloistered nun, and her letters, or at least the translation of the letters in this book, show her to be a woman of lively intellect and wit, and starting each chapter with an excerpt of one of her letters was an inspired choice.

But ultimately this is a book about Galileo– a book called Suor Maria Celeste’s Father would not have sold many copies– and, well, Galileo was Goddamned fascinating, so if the author is of even middling talent writing a good book about him should not be especially difficult, and as it turns out Dava Sobel possesses far more than the typical allotted share of talent. So maybe this isn’t as comprehensive a review as I might have thought I was going to write when I sat down, but I assume the You Should Read This is still coming through at sufficient volume for you to hear it. Because you should.

Most of us have some sort of memories of Spring Break, although I suspect for most people they involve parties, or beaches, or some form of public drunkenness. For me, on the other hand, my strongest memory of Spring Break, one I reminisce about every time my own break rolls around, involves going to see a movie on the first night of a Spring Break in grad school with a good friend of mine who is a professor at Oxford now. We had to stand outside to wait for tickets in a driving, wet, utterly bullshit snowstorm in downtown Chicago, and Bill stepped out of line for a moment, threw his arms over his head, yelled “SPRING BREAK!” at the top of his lungs, and rejoined the line without another word.

I may not have partied enough as a young man, is what I’m saying here. And I openly laughed at anyone who asked me what I was “doing” for my break. I’m going to be sitting in a damn chair reading a book, that’s what I’m going to be doing. And it will be glorious.