In this revised and expanded edition of Ancient Rome, author Paul A. Zoch presents the history and mythology of Rome, from its legendary progenitor Aeneas to the death of the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius in 180 c.e. Zoch guides readers through the military campaigns and political developments that shaped Rome's rise from a small Italian city to the greatest imperial power the world had ever known, and he includes stories about its protagonists - such as Romulus and Remus, Horatius, and Nero - that are often omitted from more specialized studies. In Zoch's retelling, the events and personalities of ancient Rome spring to life. We witness the long struggle against the enemy city of Carthage. We follow Caesar as he campaigns in Britain, and we observe the ebb and flow of Rome's fortunes in the Hellenistic East. Emphasizing both the political and moral lessons to be learned from Roman history - and that remain relevant today - Zoch gives readers a narrative that is both entertaining and informative. An afterword takes the history to the fall of the Roman Empire in the West in 476 c.e.

Since hardly anyone is happy with American schools, it's always open season for school reform-with inevitable calls for better teaching, better curriculums, better organization, etc., etc. In these continuing exhortations, little attention is paid to the role of the students themselves, the object of the "learning process." In this explosive book, Paul Zoch argues that what America most needs to improve its schools is not necessarily better teachers but a wholesale shift in the way it thinks about who or what creates academic success. The tendency to look to teachers for students' achievement, he maintains, is the cause of low performance. Tracing the development of educational ideas in the United States from the time of William James to the present day, Mr. Zoch shows how they have given the schools an obsessive focus on teachers and their teaching methods while neglecting the disciplined effort and hard work that students must expend in order to achieve. Because most students, in accordance with society's prevailing views, see their success as a product of what their teachers do, they devote little effort to their studies and, predictably enough, learn little. Their dedication to schoolwork, as Mr. Zoch demonstrates, falls far short of that routinely displayed by students in other, less prosperous countries. Doomed to Fail is one of the freshest and most compelling investigations of the plight of our schools to appear in many years. It is sure to create a beehive of controversy.