Over at the Talking Points Memo blog, Josh Marshall strongly recommends Peter Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, published earlier this month by Oxford University Press. And considering his audience share, I’m pretty sure that its arrival on the Amazon Top 200 list stems from the strength of that tip (“If you’re the sort who likes finding a thick book about some distant period in the past that you can lose yourself in for a spell, try this one out”). Nothing at the NYTBR on this one, but it’s only been out a few weeks—and maybe Sam Tanenhaus is waiting on a review that pairs it up with Oxford’s other big classical history title for December, Gwyn Morgan’s 69 AD: The Year of Four Emperors. That’s what I’d do, at any rate…and, yes, I’ll make a shameless public bid for the assignment, too: Pick me, pick me!

Meanwhile, Michelle Lin of Cambridge University Press mentions one of her own imprint’s titles—Singularities by Nobel laureate Christian de Duve—but she’s also enthusiastic about NYU’s Liars! Cheaters! Evildoers!: Demonization and the End of Civil Debate in American Politics. Co-author Tom De Luca has tentatively commenced blogging about contemporary examples of political demonization at The Daily Demonizer; the site shows some promise, and one hopes it’ll pick up in the new year…