The second best* non-fiction book I've read so far this year

It's "Atlas of the Roman Empire" by David Potter.

As soon as I read the rave review in the Wall Street Journal last month I took a flutter on it.

OMG, to someone like me who's been fascinated by the Roman Empire since I was first exposed to it in Miss Shaw's Latin 1 at Washington High School, which consisted of reading Julius Caesar's magnificent "The Gallic Wars" in their original Latin, this book is pure heaven.

Unlike Gibbon's "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," all six fat volumes of which I read 10-15 years ago after shying away from its immenseness for decades (full disclosure: I loved the first four volumes but it was a real trudge through the last two [you can too, right here!]), the current treatment is a lavishly illustrated 305-page oversized tome which is beautifully written and organized such that I can't wait for each day's session with it.

*The best one was David Pogue's "50 Years of Apple" — fanboi heaven.