Booked, or How I Nearly Lost My Mind Writing an Academic Book Review

As much as I love to read about and teach Roman Technology, I don't always love to write about it. Writing is hard. When I got asked to write a book review of Dr. Liba Taub's Ancient Greek and Roman Science from Oxford's Very Short Introductions series, I was flattered yet, a little fearful. I had never written a book review for a professional journal and certainly didn't think I could condense the wealth of information in this clever and brilliant book by such a distinguished author. (Dr. Taub is the director and curator at the University of Cambridge's Whipple Museum of the History of Science.)

But since I became a state teacher of the year, I've challenged myself to do things that make me uncomfortable, like share about my teaching on a blog and give a TedEd talk. I've tried to do things that I've never done before and not shy away from scary tasks, especially those that involve writing.

I used to love writing. In fact, I wrote short stories for my high school's literary magazine. I remember writing one about a painter inspired by Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray that I got a lot of compliments on. In college, as an English and classics major, I wrote dozens of academic papers about the works of Vergil, Catullus, Ovid, and Raymond Carver, one of my favorite American short story authors. And then, as I got older and out of practice, the words started to fail me.

In the past five years though, I've written a lot of stuff, articles for magazines, blog posts, both professional and personal. I still love to tell stories, but there was no way I was making a story out of this book review. Well, maybe I could have. The story would have been about me reading, taking notes, and then sitting at my keyboard with sweaty palms trying to condense the fascinating and complicated information I had just learned. I also wanted to make sure that I honored the author's achievement without being flattering but also without being too critical. Turns out, according to this book, ancient Greek and Roman science was mostly philosophy, and Dr. Taub did not discuss technology in this book so...writing about philosophy. Yeah, not fun. But I worked diligently, followed the journal's directions on what exactly they wanted to see, and finished it. It got published today. One more scary thing done!