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Persian Fire
- The First World Empire, Battle for the West
- Narrated by: Mark Meadows, Tom Holland
- Length: 15 hrs and 48 mins
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This is the intimate story of 20 tsars and tsarinas, some touched by genius, some by madness, but all inspired by holy autocracy and imperial ambition. Simon Sebag Montefiore's gripping chronicle reveals their secret world of unlimited power and ruthless empire building, overshadowed by palace conspiracy, family rivalries, sexual decadence, and wild extravagance, with a global cast of adventurers, courtesans, revolutionaries, and poets, from Ivan the Terrible to Tolstoy and Pushkin.
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Publisher's Summary
In 480 BC, Xerxes, the King of Persia, led an invasion of mainland Greece. Its success should have been a formality. For 70 years, victory - rapid, spectacular victory - had seemed the birthright of the Persian Empire. In the space of a single generation, they had swept across the Near East, shattering ancient kingdoms, storming famous cities, putting together an empire which stretched from India to the shores of the Aegean. As a result of those conquests, Xerxes ruled as the most powerful man on the planet. Yet somehow, astonishingly, against the largest expeditionary force ever assembled, the Greeks of the mainland managed to hold out. The Persians were turned back. Greece remained free. Had the Greeks been defeated at Salamis, not only would the West have lost its first struggle for independence and survival, but it is unlikely that there would ever have been such an entity as the West at all.
Tom Holland's brilliant book describes the very first 'clash of Empires' between East and West. Once again he has found extraordinary parallels between the ancient world and our own. There is no competing popular book describing these events.
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- randy hanson
- 2019-10-22
Awesome book. I love Tom Holland
great work. a well balanced amount of attention is given to both the Persian Empire and the seperate nations of Greece. Holland has a great talent for making a gripping story, being a former science fiction writer. He's also great at writing about rather large spaces of history in a relatively short book. this book stretches from Cyrus the great to the end of the second Greco-Persian war, giving the optimal amounts of detail that makes the story exciting to read. his ability to do this makes him one of my favorite writers
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