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Comment by burlesona | Hacker News Reader

Nice article, but the author says up front that he wrote the book with an angle:

> I jokingly said when I started writing, that I wanted people to come out of it with a general feeling of unease about what’s going on in the United States and in the West generally. To emerge from reading the book, go back to flipping on the news, and think, “This is not good.”

So... if you read it and think "wow this is eerily parallel to our current reality," it's going to be hard to know how much of that is because it _really was_ eerily parallel, and how much is because the author _wanted it to feel_ eerily parallel.

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He said in the very sentence you cite that he said so jokingly.

Regardless, I read a few books about the fall of the Republic a couple of years ago, all of which were written pre-Trump, and I did indeed find the resemblance eerie.

“When I was doing the History of Rome [podcast], so many people asked me, ‘Is the United States Rome? Are we following a similar trajectory?’ If you start to do some comparisons between the rise and development of the U.S. and rise and development of Rome, you do wind up in this same place. The United States emerging from the Cold War has some analogous parts to where Rome was after they defeated Carthage [in 146 B.C.]. This period was a wide-open field to fill a gap in our knowledge.”

Perhaps it’s is so. Unrelated to his joke, it’s similar and worth the read.

Just like a lawyer in court he wants you to come to a given conclusion but he is constrained by the facts.

Provided the author <is> constrained by the facts, that's a perfectly reasonable position. If he ignores facts unhelpful to his view he'll be seen through by astute critics.

The author in question is a fairly renowned historian with multiple serious books and podcasts ( in which btw he makes a point of correcting himself when listeners point out mistakes, usually of the bad pronunciation or mistaken year variety), and has a reputation to maintain.

I greatly admire Mike Duncan and I have listened to every episode of his History of Rome _and_ his current Revolutions podcast, as well as read the book this article is about, but ...

I think the assertion that Mike Duncan is "a fairly renowned historian" needs some qualifications. For one, I don't think he has a history degree. And while he seems to be very good at compiling various sources and summarising them in a way that is accessible to the general interested public (and I do agree that he doesn't pretend everything is simple when it's not, and that he corrects his mistakes), that doesn't mean that he does original research, or if he does, that this research is in any way peer-reviewed by the larger community of historians.

This is not a bad thing, but it's something to keep in mind when reading a book that tries to paint a particular narrative. (And I did really enjoy reading the book, FWIW)

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