Mercer perhaps best sums up Alexander the Great's theme in the closing pages, when he quotes from W. W. Tarn's biography of the same title: "For whatever else he [Alexander] was, he was one of the supreme fertilizing forces of history. He lifted the civilized world out of one groove and set it in another; he started a new epoch; nothing could again be as it had been."

Alexander the Great contains unusually good characterizations for a work of nonfiction. Even some of the secondary characters are well drawn. Olympias, Alexander's mother, is the beautiful and mysterious daughter of the king of Epirus, a mountain kingdom near present-day Yugoslavia. She engages in mystical rites, charms snakes, and claims to be descended from Achilles, the famed Greek warrior of the Iliad.

Extremely domineering, she soon repels King Philip, frightening him with her reputed powers as...