Written like a highschool student phoning it in.

This book is not about the Byzantine Empire, it's only a list of emperors and their accomplishments and failures. It sounds as if it was writhen at the 5th grad reading level and it is not even a good summary of the emperors. The author also bizarrely veers off the path to condemn icon veneration and praise iconoclasm halfway through the book. I would recommend a Wikipedia article over this.

2 people found this helpful

Written at the level of an undergraduate research paper

The narrator mispronounced so many names and even simple words like “simultaneously”.

Do not recommend

Narrator can't pronounce basic words like Croatia

Narrator seems to read like a robot, pausing too long on commas, not pausing on natural breaks in the paragraphs, and leaving gaps where you are confused which sentence starts where. One of the worst "audiobooks" I've ever listened to. It's barely 2 hours long, and is more like some person who knows nothing about history or the world, reading snippets of Wikipedia to you. I am rating a 1-2 star and returning this "book" to get my money back. Not ordering any Captivating History books ever again. Super scammy, and I should have listened to the sample! But the reviews were so good, which makes me wonder who would actually give this a good review? Literally every single sentence that he reads, with commas making a list, cause him to read in the strangest inflections and distracting pauses.

Some words that the narrator seems to have never seen before reading this: Croatia, sepulcher, etc.

Good history, five stars.

I am 41years old and I love this series from Captivating History team. I've learned so much from these books. They're extremely informative and certainly most fascinating. I've learned more from this series than I did from history class in school.

Decent Introduction with good details.

Like most of the Captivating History Books, this one is a well written short read. It covers the basics, contains details and sparks your interest to continuing one's research on the subject. Highly recommended.

I enjoyed listening to this book.

A is a decent book but I touched it could not decide if it was going to be a technical book on weapons and armies or a vivid account of those last months of Constantinople .It tried to do both in great detail and became hard reading in the telling.

A good book, a good addition.

Audible format of this historical book has merit for providing a quick summary of the key elements of historical scenarios and is an excellent precursor to a subsequent more detailed analysis of points of interest that may emerge from the overview.