The First Man in Rome by Colleen McCullough Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The First Man in Rome
Book Review: Collossal Roman Epic
Summary: 4 Stars
I loved this entire series, truly a staggering amount of research behind this telling of Rome's passage from republic to tyranny. McCollough fleshes out EVERYTHING in the endless pages of her story, so get ready to disappear into this world, and get ready to know more about ancient Rome than you ever thought you would. Hate to scare anyone off, but the FIRST MAN IN
ROME is not only endlessly entertaining, this is reading that makes you a better person.
Book Review: Colossal! Tremendous read full of accuracy and absolutely riveting
Summary: 5 Stars
First to get rid of the problems: Colleen McCullough rarely does any battle scenes. She's not really one of those who deals much with battles or the personal one-on-ones of soldiers or generals, much better to skip over it or just go over the general scope of it. The next is the sheer size of the book! This is only book one in a series of five others! It took me a month of reading about 30 minutes a day on average each weekday to get done!
Colleen McCullough does a tremendous job with this book, "The First Man in Rome", the absolute best historical fiction I've read so far (and I haven't begun the next five books in the series). With small font, thin paper pages, and over 1000 pages strong, this one was truly an epic! The political dramas were excellent and compelling, and the subplots were as intriguing as the main plot, including the very brilliant and thrilling backstory on Lucius Cornelius Sulla and his rise to power.
I don't know exactly what to say except that it is a vast, brilliant epic spanning all aspects of Ancient life. She is bold and shows no recoil or flinching at the descriptions of sex, gay sex, and blood. She also describes food quite well
Book Review: Decent, but highly overrated
Summary: 3 Stars
What a disappointment. After all the great things I heard about this book and this series, First Man in Rome is a real letdown.The positive: McCullogh has a flare for character. Her Marius, Scaurus and Sulla leap to life as fully formed and fleshed out characters. Their competing motivations and personal doubts are ever in our minds and their actions follow logically from the established personalities. The descriptions are detailed and the book - curious as its politics are - is certainly well-researched.
The negatives: The ludicrous "populares" bias and cartoonish portrayal of every conservative but Scaurus will leave some readers to believe that Rome was little but a confederacy of dunces until an Italian hayseed showed them the error of their ways. Nonsense. Mix this with overly turgid prose, a cumbersome method of mixing explanation with exposition in dialogue and the constant repetition of phrases over and over and over again (the Italian hayseed comment for one) and you have a book that only occasionally springs to life.
Book Review: Dull, dull, dull!
Summary: 2 Stars
In her attempt to prove she did her research, she turns what should be a fascinating period in history into a profound snore. I could hardly plod on to the end, and I won't pick up another in this series.Book Review: Encyclopedic Sociological Recreation Of Ancient Rome
Summary: 4 Stars
A heavy, slow book but also meticulously detailed and the nearest to a vacation in ancient Rome you can get for the price of a paperback. McCollough' story is set in the latter days of the Roman Republic and centers on the upstart Marius, a radical, brilliant, bold gambler of a military man who leads his nation through internal and external crises that threaten the stability and identity of the eternal city. It is also a novel about Sulla, who begins here a dissipating hedonist who aspires to dignified status, and by story's end caps a rising career of brave service by becoming the darling of Rome's conservative factions. This is also the story of two very different sisters, distant relations to the couple that will one day produce Julius Caesar, who wed the men at the foundation of this novel, and help guide their husbands to their unique destinies. In The First Man In Rome, there is a glossary that does much more than define terms that might be foreign to the modern mind, it also educates about everything from Roman clothing and foods, to the Roman way of keeping time, the Roman martial arts, legal system and economy, and the social structure of the era. This is a novel firmly grounded in fact and it shows. If it bogs you down with its slow tone, keep with it, it rewards you for your perseverance, especially in retrospect.