My complaint in these cases is that yes, I can find it, but I would first have to know what I'm looking for and yet I have no way to recognize what the best book is.
If I wanted to learn about Sparta, I would have no way of knowing whether Paul Cartledge's book is better than Stephen Hodkinson's or Steven Pressfield's. And God help me if one of them has a loyal Twitter following spamming 5-star reviews everywhere...
I come from a really small town and made it further than anyone I know in that town in tech. (Not in terms of money, though)
Just Google: "best books on Sparta reddit". You will find 10 threads, and on those threads if you look at top-k, you will see some entries recurring. And two-three lines of explanation.
Read a non-trivial amount of sections to know whether it is what you are looking for. Library is a good place. You can also check Google Books or pirate before buying.
Not only about books but about MOOCs, YT playlists, and so on.
I have used this method since Junior year in High School, straight up to Master’s degree. I always got good grades, many times topped the class.
So you absolutely do have a way of knowing. What you usually don't have a reliable way of knowing is how good of a teacher on Sparta a local history teacher happens to be. And the answer is usually, not good enough to write a book on it.
> So you absolutely do have a way of knowing.
As long as you already know enough about Sparta to be able to tell whether those blog posts, Reddit threads, and Amazon and Goodreads reviews are legit or spam.
> What you usually don't have a reliable way of knowing is how good of a teacher on Sparta a local history teacher happens to be.
Are you saying you honestly can't think of a way to vet a local teacher? How about taking to their students?
> And the answer is usually, not good enough to write a book on it.
Which, coincidentally, can be said for most authors as well, but that doesn't stop them from writing a book and then flooding the internet with blog posts, Reddit threads, and Amazon and Goodreads reviews about how good it is.
Nope, it's more of just a generalized credibility/bullshit detector. It has zero to do with the topic at hand. This is a major life skill that is important to develop.
> Are you saying you honestly can't think of a way to vet a local teacher? How about taking to their students?
You can figure out if they're good at teaching as a general skill (although contacting a bunch of students who are willing to take the time to talk to you is a lot of work). It's quite difficult to suss out their actual knowledgeability, however. For example, you can find a local moral philosophy professor who is well-liked, but who will teach everything through a lens of Kantianism and disparage consequentialism and never even mention virtue ethics. And you could spend 50 hours of private tutoring and never know you were receiving major bias and being left with huge gaps -- something unlikely to happen if you spent the same time carefully reading a couple of well-respected intro textbooks on the subject.
> ...and then flooding the internet...
See above about credibility/bullshit detection. Remember, don't look at average stars or anything like that, look for posts/reviews that go in-depth where you can tell the reviewer knows what they're talking about, and then look for consistent commonalities between posts.
I guess the same detector hasn't been developed well enough to apply to teachers promoting themselves. That's a shame, generalizing is an important life skill to develop.
And even when you do, you should still remember that almost anyone can find and have access to a world-class book, while you're quite unlikely to have a world-class expert locally to teach you.
I do not believe this is possible. Sure, you can tell if the reviewer thinks he knows what he is talking about, and that some internet people agree with him, but you cannot judge whether he is really correct unless you are already a subject matter expert.
Or, by Douglas Adams, knowing the question is pretty important.
Oh god. Why Sparta? Why this particular historiographical can of worms, where the history of the history is far more convoluted than the history of Lacedaemon itself?
No. Someone without a pretty solid knowledge of Ancient Greek history and historiography and the skills to be able to track the changes in the research literature is going to have a damn hard time finding the best book on Sparta.