Believe it or not, I read this book straight through like it was a novel. While it can serve as a reference work, the author also does an amazing job of showing the continuity in the whole history so it has a definite narrative element as you go through. While it could certainly be argued that because this overall structure is so strong that he may have been tendacious in the excerpts or that the interpretations could be more sophisticated, it is essentially an introduction and as such is a great book.