There is a good case to be made that Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is the single most famous work of history ever written in the English language. Published in the auspicious year of 1776, Gibbon’s first volume of Decline and Fall landed to instant success and acclaim. Its first print run sold out, necessitating an immediate second printing. It has been in continuous print ever since. The success of the books made Gibbon a literary and intellectual celebrity in his own time and landed Decline and Fall on the syllabus of every university in the English-speaking world. Well into the twentieth century, Gibbon was regarded as the authority on the Roman Empire. To be educated was to have read Gibbon.
But while the impact and influence of Decline and Fall is almost impossible to overstate, we are not here to prove Gibbon wrote a uniquely significant work of history. He obviously did. We are here to ask whether Decline and Fall holds up. Is this a work that still deserves the power of authority it immediately wielded? Does it command attention and respect from the foremost practitioners of the historical discipline today? Should parents and teachers consider it a reliable guide to the Roman world to assign students in the twenty-first century? The short answer to all three of these questions is … no. Absolutely not. On all three counts.
Readers who opt in by picking up his latest, And Then? And Then? What Else? will get to spend 200 pages and change frolicking in Handler’s mind as he struggles to figure out what it really is. It’s a bit of a genre-buster, this book, a sort of memoir in which he’ll do infuriatingly vague things like talk about his time in college without naming where he went (Wesleyan, if you’re interested), describe in detail how he writes while shying away from the writerly phrase process, and lean in to a tradition of many before him, from Didion to Orwell, from David Foster Wallace to Zadie Smith, examining the peculiar compulsion that leads anyone to put words together, thereby, perhaps, helping you do the same.
Today, the fecundity and majesty of the high seas revealed by Challenger are being destroyed before scientists have had a proper chance to explore their wonders, marine biologists warn. “Our vast, deep ocean is incredibly fragile and its greatest threat is us,” the science journalist Olive Heffernan states in this comprehensive and disturbing investigation of the avarice and lawlessness that now afflict our ungoverned oceans.