This book was much larger than I thought it would be. However, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Heather deals with an immense amount of information, most of it unfamiliar to the average reader, and does so with an easy style. He also manages to avoid condescending to the readers. At times I wondered why he included certain information because the narratives did not necessarily connect. However, Heather's concluding chapter is a masterpiece in summary. He reviews all the information he presented earlier in the book in a concise, well-structured manner that helps the reader put all the pieces of Heather's narrative together in a way that can do nothing else than support Heather's thesis that the barbarian invasions were the cause of the fall of the Western Roman empire. (It's hard to be convinced otherwise after reading this book.)