A COIN FOR THE FERRYMAN, interesting exploration of timeless male arrogance

A COIN FOR THE FERRYMAN
MEGAN EDWARDS
Imbrifex Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 3.9* of five

The Publisher Says: The story can now be told.

In 1999, an elite interdisciplinary team headed by Nobel laureate Andrew Danicek gathered in California to carry out a ground-breaking time-travel experiment. While the rest of the world remained unaware, Julius Caesar was successfully transported from the last day of his life to a specially-constructed covert facility. Four days of conversation with historians and Latin scholars were planned, followed by Caesar’s return to the moment from which he was extracted. But despite the team’s meticulous efforts to maintain secrecy and plan for all possible exigencies, a kidnap attempt plunges Caesar into peril. Fully aware that the future of civilization may hang in the balance, one team member must summon strength she didn’t know she possessed to return Caesar to the Ides of March.

The shocking details of Caesar's visit and its effect on subsequent events have been protected by draconian nondisclosure agreements....until now.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'd wondered, as I set out to read this time-travel/alternate history story, if I was instead going to get an academia/tech sector skulduggery thriller-lite. In a way I did; but that's how the author seduced me into investing in the characters. Sneaky sneaky, you storytelling devil you...but also very clever.

I got invested in the people, their desires and foibles, before I was confronted with the disbelief hurdle of physical time travel. (It's not possible until our energy budget expands multiple times current (!) limitations.) I might've never finished this quite enjoyable book had that not been the order of operations. I'm willing to go into fantasyland if I'm following people I've become interested in.The infighting and interpersonal politicking kept me invested and ready for more.

Then Caesar, a man born into pinnacles of privilege the Proud Boys can only dream of, arrives on the scene.

Never mind the technology is unrealistic...this is fiction. I was clangingly dropped to the decking by the man's apparent mental flexibility, of which there was no sign in history. See Commentarii de Bello Gallico if you doubt this. His own words, admittedly written for an audience, condemn him for a chauvinist Roman-centric genocidal maniac...out-Hitlers Hitler all day every day. Trump and his clown-car of cynical sycophants are the rankest...term used advisedly...of amateurs (kidnapping the sitting president of another country?! what could possibly go wrong?) in comparison.

Yet this era-defining man of destiny accepts the technology and the social reality...conversing with a woman he's neither related to, nor married to, nor a common whore without a blink!...of this century with apparent ease.

I don't buy it.

It caused a long hiatus in my reading. I was not best pleased by the very detailed and slightly overdone explanatory elements of the storytelling signally failing to reveal the massive cognitive shock anyone would experience in these circumstances not being addressed at all; I can certainly see not foregrounding it given the story the author wants to tell.

Hubris and overweening self-regard are blatantly on display in every era's politics and technology sectors. No progress ever made has been free of them; no disaster ever inflicted on the world and her people has ever not stemmed from them. They are present in, are central to, this narrative. It's what ultimately drew me back to finish the read in 2025. I can't say I'm over the moon or ecstatic with the read, but I liked a lot about it...Cassandra being a classicist, really, was both sticking point and advantage as the Latin bits being translated went from implausibility trap to logical extension of the character's expertise. But it was a knife's edge. That pretty much sums up my experience of the read: always on a knife's edge between a low three stars and touching the ragged edge of four stars.

You see where I settled. You'll do your own thinking about what it means, decide whether or not to include this tale of hubris and arrogance through time on your own TBR.

MORTAL REPUBLIC: How Rome Fell into Tyranny, using History to explain the present pretty convincingly

MORTAL REPUBLIC: How Rome Fell into Tyranny
EDWARD J. WATTS
Basic Books
$18.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Learn why the Roman Republic collapsed—and how it could have continued to thrive—with this insightful history from an award-winning author.

In Mortal Republic, prize-winning historian Edward J. Watts offers a new history of the fall of the Roman Republic that explains why Rome exchanged freedom for autocracy. For centuries, even as Rome grew into the Mediterranean’s premier military and political power, its governing institutions, parliamentary rules, and political customs successfully fostered negotiation and compromise.

By the 130s BC, however, Rome’s leaders increasingly used these same tools to cynically pursue individual gain and obstruct their opponents. As the center decayed and dysfunction grew, arguments between politicians gave way to political violence in the streets. The stage was set for destructive civil wars—and ultimately the imperial reign of Augustus.

The death of Rome’s Republic was not inevitable. In Mortal Republic, Watts shows it died because it was allowed to, from thousands of small wounds inflicted by Romans who assumed that it would last forever.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The Mary Beard School of Skepticism About Past as Prologue is in session.

The past is no Oracle and historians are not prophets, but this does not mean that it is wrong to look to antiquity for help understanding the present.

This is intensely controversial. I am not at all sure it is true, but after reading this thoroughly researched and well sourced in the facts that we can know book, I'll put a pin in my inclination to doubt. I can enjoy this book on its factual merits quite well enough.

The author focuses his attention on the period between the victory of the Romans over Carthage in the Second Punic War, and Octavian's usurpation of power, effectively beginning the Empire. That time, its unrest and gradual normalization of political gridlock and, ultimately, violence, does bear a resemblance to the current pass in US–and world–politics.

I have no kick with that fact being pointed out. I am pretty confident the author's analysis of what led up to the events, and how what went down made the resolution of the problems seem pretty obvious. The way he has used the chapter order is, pretty clearly, tendentious...a downward slide from functioning, if troubled republic into one-man rule and autocracy just *feels* more and more inevitable as the facts we know are marshaled.

Where I go a little off his carefully laid rails is where he posits his ideas for how the slide was not inevitable, and the autocracy could've been avoided. That is allohistory which, by itself, is fine by me. But this is presented with a very authoritative air, not differentiated from the text based on facts that surrounds it, and that felt a bit like I was being led to agree without any facts or evidence that his conclusions were plausible. There can not be any such evidence or facts because that isn't how things *did* play out. I can't say he's wrong for all the same reasons.

The desire to show us how to fix the ugly, scary passage we're going through by using the past as a model makes a lot of sense. It still shouldn't be presented as being the equal of the fact-based narrative around it.

Your history-loving giftee, your anxious old uncle who just knows The End Is Nigh, will lap up this story. The good thing is that, as the facts pile up, the author hands the reader this double-edged aerçu:

No republic is eternal. It lives only as long as its citizens want it.

That is hopeful, if you believe there is a chance to warn and arm people against what is occurring; and disheartening, because look what happened to Rome.

The author is of the former opinion, and this book is the case he makes for it.