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Rating: 
Summary: Author's Comments on Paperback Edition
Review: As one of the authors of Citadel to City State, I believe that it is inappropriate for me to rate it. However, Amazon's format forces me to assign a rating to the book and since I am proud of it, I gave it a high rating. I can confess that work invested in the book was rewarding and even pleasant, at least most of the time. And I was happy to learn that the publisher judged it worthy of a paperback edition so that our picture of early Greece might reach more people.Its focus is the centuries between the collapse of the heroic Mycenaean civilization and the Classical Age of Greece, i.e. from a civilization based on citadels to one founded on city states. Once thought to be a long, bleak period in which little of significance occurred, new evidence shows it to be a bridge of transformation from one way of life to another. We track that process by focusing on five individual places that demonstrate the steps in the process, a Plutarch's Lives of Places rather than of People. A recent and suprising token of the appeal of our approach was an invitation to speak to a joint meeting of the local Sigma Xi chapter and the Puget Sound American Chemical Society. The inviter wrote, "recently I read your book, Citadel to City State...It was intriguing about how, in the absence of writing, that it was possible to piece together the social events of that period." The book showed, he continued, "the synergy between the sciences and the humanities." Lessening the divide between the sciences and humanities was not a conscious goal of our book but it is an unexpected and welcome result. Growing specialization has produced such tight compartments of fields over the past half century that collaboration has been difficult. The new spirit of cooperation and interest is vital to an understanding of the base.
Rating:
Summary: Author's Comments on Paperback Edition
Review: As one of the authors of Citadel to City State, I believe that it is inappropriate for me to rate it. However, Amazon's format forces me to assign a rating to the book and since I am proud of it, I gave it a high rating. I can confess that work invested in the book was rewarding and even pleasant, at least most of the time. And I was happy to learn that the publisher judged it worthy of a paperback edition so that our picture of early Greece might reach more people. Its focus is the centuries between the collapse of the heroic Mycenaean civilization and the Classical Age of Greece, i.e. from a civilization based on citadels to one founded on city states. Once thought to be a long, bleak period in which little of significance occurred, new evidence shows it to be a bridge of transformation from one way of life to another. We track that process by focusing on five individual places that demonstrate the steps in the process, a Plutarch's Lives of Places rather than of People. A recent and suprising token of the appeal of our approach was an invitation to speak to a joint meeting of the local Sigma Xi chapter and the Puget Sound American Chemical Society. The inviter wrote, "recently I read your book, Citadel to City State...It was intriguing about how, in the absence of writing, that it was possible to piece together the social events of that period." The book showed, he continued, "the synergy between the sciences and the humanities." Lessening the divide between the sciences and humanities was not a conscious goal of our book but it is an unexpected and welcome result. Growing specialization has produced such tight compartments of fields over the past half century that collaboration has been difficult. The new spirit of cooperation and interest is vital to an understanding of the base.
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