The Middle Sea

A History of the Mediterranean

By: John Julius Norwich

Narrated by: Alpha Trivette

This lively and dramatic book brings roaring to life the grand sweep of 5,000 years of history in the cradle of civilization.

A colorful account of the civilizations that rose and fell on the lands bordering the Mediterranean, The Middle Sea represents the culmination of a great historian’s unparalleled art and scholarship. John Julius Norwich provides brilliant portraits of the Phoenicians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the French, the Venetians, the Popes, and the pirates of the Gulf. Above all, he deftly traces the intermingling of ancient conflicts and modern sensibilities that shapes life today on the shores of the Middle Sea.

©2006 John Julius Norwich (P)2014 Audible Inc.

Critic reviews

"Norwich’s focus plays to his strengths as a military historian, and he produces, over six hundred pages, a highly readable chronicle." ( The New Yorker)

"Norwich is irresistibly readable...superbly erudite yet having a sense of popular taste...A fine single-volume history suited to any collection." ( Booklist)

“Norwich's history of the Mediterranean is a cause for celebration...A demonstration of his unrivaled narrative skills...No one planning a simple vacation by the wine-dark sea can afford to leave this book at home." ( The Washington Post)

not awful but filled with errors

This text jumps around with little regard for the coherence of the subject matter itself or the interrelationships and origins of the peoples mentioned. Worse, it includes a lot of basic errors in fact that should have been caught well before it reached both paperback and audiobook, like the offhand claim that Darius I killed Cambyses II. It's worth a read/listen, but be cautious about repeating things it says without verifying the facts.

An engaging history with a terrible reader.

This reader's bizarre pronunciation is very distracting. He mispronounces not just proper names, but a great many normal English words.

Interesting concept, but overall disappointing.

I really liked the concept of this book, which is a "biography" of the cultures Mediterranean sea and their conflicts from antiquity to the end of the First World War. In places, it's a great story, full of interesting and colorful anecdotes. It suffers from two main faults, as I see it.

First, after the fall of Rome, and certainly once he enters into the 19th century, Norwich shifts to an almost exclusive discussion of the various conflicts that swept across the Mediterranean littoral over the last 1000 years. While these are important, and have consequences we live with to this day, the shifting of borders and movements of armies doesn't translate well to audio. Moreover, after the fall of Rome he all but entirely drops the discussion of cultural developments, ethnic interactions, and social forces which had been discussed more thoroughly when dealing with the empires of antiquity. The Renaissance gets barely a mention, nor is there any discussion of the flow of knowledge and technologies across the Mediterranean.

Second, the narrator is a huge distraction. I thought that "Alpha Trivette" was the name of a crappy text-to-speech program, but according to IMDB he is an actual actor of some sort. However, he has the most jarring delivery, often pausing at odd spots mid-sentence; I set the playback speed to 1.25x to smooth out the flow, which helped. Worse still, he has a tin ear for the pronunciation of, well, every other language spoken around the Mediterranean. For example, the Italian name Gugliermo is rendered "googly-ermo" rather than "gool-yer-mo," the Israeli port of Acre is rendered "ack-ree" rather than "aker," and on and on. I wish readers would check on the pronunciation of words they were unfamiliar with before jumping in and thoroughly mangling everything.

Fine narrator. Great history.

I can't understand the complaints. I love Norwich's books and have never found fault with his narrators. If you are an American, you'll be pleased that Alpha Trivette has no difficult accent.

The ending was pretty silly

The book does a decent job of spreading out history but the conclusions were laughable. If only Gallipoli had succeeded there would have been no Russian revolution and the First World War would have been shortened by years saving millions of lives. Sure...