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Customer Review
- Reviewed in the United States on July 6, 2013Historical biographies tend to be bland, long-winded, but such was not the case with this book. Immediately, I was drawn to him; I was fascinated by his primal ambition to conquer things, by his obsession of being great. It does something to me inside to read about someone relentlessly achieving his goal, like a bulldozer flattening everything in its path. Though he might simply be discounted as a mass murderer by our modern culture, he was a product of his time. Wars were waged by much, much lesser men. He just did things better.
The book also reads like a novel; the author, Philip Freeman, has a fictional flair in his writings, describing battle scenes vividly. My favorite part was when Alexander, in his typical bold fashion, climbs to the top of the enemy's fortress by himself, with his troops still on the other side of the wall. The enemy cuts him off, and realizing that he would make a bigger target on top, he voluntarily jumps into the enemy's camp. There, alone and outnumbered, he tests his luck greatly, almost getting skewered to death. His men, in crazed state, break into the citadel, saving their king in a nearly fatal state. Out of their love and respect for the king, the men scold him afterward for being so stupid. Alexander then did not know how to tell his friends that such an act was also his duty as a king...
With each of his passing victories in battles, I found myself inspired, rooting for him to go further and further. When his journey finally ended, not by sword but by disease, my only question was, how far could he have gone otherwise?
