Customer Reviews

Attila The Hun: A Barbarian King and the Fall of Rome

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Is it me, or are modern days authors making historical books that much more readable. Most of the historical books I have read recently are far removed from the dusty old volumes that lay mouldering in the bookcase or on the shelves of the library. Mainly, I believe because the contents inside the book are as dry and dusty as the outside and of little value to anyone other than a scholar.

This book is written with a light touch, making it refreshingly readable without straying from the facts. If more books were written in this way, history would become a rare treat, rather than something that is there mainly for the academic.

Although most schoolboys know the name Attila, a man who was known for his barbarism, and some may even be able to tell you that he was instrumental in holding the fate of the Roman Empire in his hands. Very little else is known about the man himself and the warriors he led.

In the early 5th century AD Attila and his warriors earned an undying reputation for savagery, the like of which had never been seen. His empire briefly rivalled that of Rome, reaching from the Rhine to the Black Sea, the Baltic to the Balkans.
This book is a compelling read about the man, known throughout history as a barbarian, who was arrogant and ruthless, but on the other side of the coin a man with a brilliant mind and the charisma to win the loyalty of millions. I enjoyed it tremendously.

This is an awful book. I am generally a subscriber to John Milton's adage that 'he who destroys a book destroys reason itself', but Man's work is a definite candidate for the bin. First of all, it isn't even a biography of Attila the Hun: it mostly deals with Man's tedious concern with disproving the ancient Roman prejudice against the Huns. Every time it threatens to become interesting as a historical text, Man spoils it by telling some unamusing and largely irrelevant story about his own travels, asking some silly rhetorical question (I don't know, do you?), as if he's addressing a bunch of primary school kids, or he breaks off to, for instance, spend a whole chapter talking about some nutty Hungarian who's convinced he has rediscovered the art of horseback archery without the slightest archaeological evidence to support him. Man's notions about the Hobbesian nature of nomads is also wrong: as one of the few people of my generation who has lived full time with a traditional nomadic tribe, I can say with some conviction that it is largely untrue that nomads covet the material wealth of settled people

Worst of all, though - and this is what REALLY condemns the book for me - is its ideological flaw. Man has the audacity to suggest that 'we ought to respect the Huns because they were a distinct culture with their own traditions', then demolishes his own case by proving that the Huns were nothing more than a clan of nomads from the steppes who consciously decided to throw all moral principles to the wind, and live by murder, rape and pillage. Afficionados of THE SOPRANOS might think this is dandy - that people or societies that have dedicated their lives to murder and theft are 'just the same as everybody else' but personally, I never got past the first season. I beg to think that this is Oxbridge 'church of reason' Liberal Orthodoxy at its most destructive worst. If we are to respect the Huns for being murderous savages, why not respect the Nazis, who after all, were also a distinct culture with their own traditions: if they murdered 6 million Jews in cold blood, so what? After all it was just their culture, so who are we to judge? In the end all Man did for me was convince me that the Romans were right.