Miracula: Weird and Wonderful Stories of Ancient Greece and Rome

In this by turns amusing and tedious compendium, historian Chrystal (World-Changing Women) bombards readers with outlandish and surreal things written by ancient Greeks and Romans. He arranges them into chapters whose subheadings seem to promise more detailed ruminations on specific practices or experiences (from voyeurism to being left-handed), but the tidbits are so bereft of context they will frustrate anyone seeking a larger explanation for why Strabo wrote that the Irish are cannibals, whether the story of Publius’s decapitated head delivering an oracle was viewed as historically accurate, or how common female infanticide by exposure to the elements really was. Still, Chrystal maintains a jocular tone (“Eat your heart out John Hurt,” he proclaims after describing a pestilence that led to snakes bursting out of those infected) and the individual items range from amusing (such as a naturalist’s report that a beaver would self-castrate when being hunted for its medicinally valuable testicles like a robber who “sacrifices all that he is carrying to save his life”) to horrifying (such as instructions found alongside an ancient Roman voodoo doll advising practitioners of magical spells for fidelity to back them up with abusive deprivation of food and sleep). While entertaining to dip in and out of, this catalog of curiosities doesn’t add up to more than the sum of its parts. (May)