Title: Strangely popular, but only pretty good
Product review: I give this book only 2 stars because it has been widely overhyped for years. As an account of the famous Battle of Thermopylae, it is a serviceable adventure, written with a fair degree of descriptive skill, but it ain't Proust. On the downside, it perpetuates a lot of heroic cliches about the Spartans. So noble are these fellows, so full of vim and valor, you can't imagine why the helots would resent them so. A good indication of how distorted it is is the fact that modern Greeks love it--Pressfield has been made an honorary citizen of Sparta.I recommend instead Nicholas Nicastro's excellent "Isle of Stone." It is much more realistic about the true nature of Sparta, which was in fact the model for totalitarian systems throughout history. It is also written with more skill, with better rounded characters, and avoiding the stilted claptrap of Pressfield's dialog.
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