I read The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World by Bettany Hughes in 2025 and gave it 3 stars
A good read that I picked up at one of my favorite local shops. This book, while packed with information, would probably have been better as a long-form journal/magazine piece rather than a book. It felt like reading a Wikipedia article, where you keep clicking to go deeper and deeper down different rabbit holes. There was a lack of cohesion in each section, more of a well-researched data dump rather than a contained piece.
Having said that, my favorite chapter was on the Mausoleum of Halikarnossos. I think it was partly due to her citing various sources that I have always enjoyed and have copies of, such as Homer’s Iliad, Aulus Gellius’s Attic Nights and Herodotus’ Histories.