Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West pdf

Thomas Holland es un autor inglés que ha publicado los libros más vendidos sobre temas que incluyen la historia clásica y medieval y los orígenes del Islam. Además de su escritura, ha trabajado con la BBC para crear y presentar documentales históricos de televisión y presenta la serie de radio Making History. Holland nació en Oxfordshire el 5 de enero de 1968 y se crió en el pueblo de Broad Chalke, Wiltshire, Inglaterra. James Holland también es un autor cuyo enfoque es la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Ha dicho que sus dos pasiones cuando era niño eran los dinosaurios y las civilizaciones antiguas. Holland asistió a la escuela preparatoria Chafyn Grove y a la escuela independiente Canford School en Dorset. Luego pasó al Queens 'College, Cambridge, donde se graduó con un' Doble Primero '(honores de primera clase en las partes I y II del curso de estudio en los Tripos ingleses). Comenzó a trabajar en una tesis doctoral sobre Lord Byron, en la Universidad de Oxford, pero pronto renunció después de decidir que estaba "harto de las universidades y harto de ser pobre" y, en cambio, comenzó a trabajar.

Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West pdf por Tom Holland

In 480 B.C., Xerxes, the King of Persia, led an invasion of mainland Greece. Its success should have been a formality. For seventy 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 in the epochal naval battle 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 new book describes the very first “clash of Empires” between East and West. As he did in the critically praised Rubicon, he has found extraordinary parallels between the ancient world and our own. There is no other popular history that takes in the entire sweep of the Persian Wars, and no other classical historian, academic or popular, who combines scholarly rigor with novelistic depth with a worldly irony in quite the fashion that Tom Holland does.