Hi Dr. Reames! I wondered if you’d read ‘Philip and Alexander: Kings and Conquerers’ by Adrian Goldsworthy, or if you had any opinion on it? I’m thinking about buying it but I wasn’t too sure about it and thought I’d ask you! :)
I have not read it, no, so I can't tell you much about it.
Goldsworthy is a respected military historian, but really a Romanist. That's part of why I've not hurried to read the book. Every year a BOATload of articles by specialists comes out, so my reading time tends to go to that, to keep up with what my colleagues are theorizing. I just reviewed the Pownall/Asirvatham/Muller collection The Courts of Philip & Alexander the Great (from DeGruyter). I recommend it. There are a couple oddball papers in it, but that's true of most conference proceedings. Quite a few important articles in that collection, if the court is your thing. :-)
But it is, of course, ridiculously expensive. So get it from a library, via ILL (interlibrary loan).
If you want a more introductory book, and more reasonably priced, I'd recommend Ed Anson's recent one Philip II: Father of Alexander the Great. Themes and Issues. It's really meant as a textbook, but it's one of the better recent books on ol' Phil. And (unlike Goldsworthy) Anson is a Macedonian specialist, especially on Philip.
So I'd put my money into Anson's book, not Goldsworthy's. the latter may be perfectly fine--probably is--but also probably won't reflect the most recent work in the field, which Ed's will. (I still think he's wrong about when the Pezhetairoi came to be applied to the whole phalanx, but that's a specialists' quarrel, ha. Ed's scholarship is dead solid.)
