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My boss knows someone who is writing an AS-Level (= 17-year-olds, for you non-Brits) Ancient History textbook on Sparta. She asked me to proofread it. I said yes. I was expecting to learn something, not... THIS. *flails*
1. Oversimplification, sometimes to the point of being outright wrong. This one I can handle. It is AS, after all.
2. She completely skims all of the problematic elements of Herodotus' so-called 'History' and tries to tell these poor kids that he's really quite reliable, actually. Of course he is! The fact that most of his information came from people in pubs and he exaggerates to make the battles sound better, makes stuff up when he doesn't know the truth (see: the infamous hippopotamus description), and is by his own admission just trying to tell a ripping good story means nothing! Nothing, I say!
Look, you don't have to go to university levels here, but my God, Herodotus is so not reliable.
3. But what's got me uncontrollably nerdraging is that I've just caught her blatantly misinterpreting a really simple source.
( Cut to save your reading pages... and your eyes. )
I don't even think she has an agenda, that's what's really making me cross. If she did have one I could understand her shoddy treatment of the sources, but from what I've read I think she's just a poor writer and a worse academic. According to her acknowledgements page, she's a poor academic who works at a college.
1. Oversimplification, sometimes to the point of being outright wrong. This one I can handle. It is AS, after all.
2. She completely skims all of the problematic elements of Herodotus' so-called 'History' and tries to tell these poor kids that he's really quite reliable, actually. Of course he is! The fact that most of his information came from people in pubs and he exaggerates to make the battles sound better, makes stuff up when he doesn't know the truth (see: the infamous hippopotamus description), and is by his own admission just trying to tell a ripping good story means nothing! Nothing, I say!
Look, you don't have to go to university levels here, but my God, Herodotus is so not reliable.
3. But what's got me uncontrollably nerdraging is that I've just caught her blatantly misinterpreting a really simple source.
( Cut to save your reading pages... and your eyes. )
I don't even think she has an agenda, that's what's really making me cross. If she did have one I could understand her shoddy treatment of the sources, but from what I've read I think she's just a poor writer and a worse academic. According to her acknowledgements page, she's a poor academic who works at a college.
