2021, Book 5: Amazons: the real warrior women of the ancient world, John Man

A pleasant enough amble through history and literature with a misleading subtitle. More than half the book deals with legend rather than history, and nearly the entire remaining portion deals with recent rather than ancient history.

The nadir of the book is undoubtedly right after a mention of Maria Gaetana Agnesi's work on calculus. Man's pathetic "I will never have any idea what [infinitessimal calculus] is" displays a deplorable lack of intellectual curiosity. This sort of half-assed pride in one's own ignorance is more befitting a ditzy cheerleader on a teen sitcom than a supposed historian and serious author. It makes one wonder how much of the rest of the book Man could not be bothered to research, because, gosh, this whole history thing is kinda tricky, and literature sure requires a lot of reading. A few pages later Man appears to either be unaware of the meaning of the term product placement, or to choose to ignore its meaning and strongarm it into a needless metaphor about the popularity of Goethe's Werther.

The chapter on the ahosi of Dahomey and the chapter on Wonder Woman were the most interesting to me. The latter is based on Jill Lepore's The secret history of Wonder Woman, which I am now curious about.