I've become interested in the history of ancient Greece. I wanted to buy the book "Greek History" by Robin Osborne but it's rather expensive. So I found this book
Now I'm unsure of the quality of this book. I tried to see if it was written by a fringe historian or something along those lines. It says the author has done a lot of work with the history channel, which sounds pretty bad.
Can anyone tell me if the book is bad or if the author is a quack?
This book is published by Yale University Press. It's a textbook, not a popular history. According to Amazon:
"About the Author Thomas R. Martin is professor of Classics at the College of the Holy Cross. His publications include Herodotus and Sima Qian: The First Great Historians of Greece and China, Ancient Rome, and, as co-author, The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures."
He's not a popular historian at all, but rather a professionally trained one. The only problem with the book might be problems one might have with textbooks generally (they can be boring, they can be conservative in their scholarship, they can be overly general), but this book should serve as a perfectly good introduction to the field, though perhaps experts in that subfield will be able to tell you about the reputation of that author and book more generally.