Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire was an airport pickup. As you might expect, this historical fiction re-telling the tale of the battle of Thermopylae got a boost from the successful movie 300. This book didn’t improve upon the movie, but history needs personality to stay alive, and this “first person” account keeps the basics straight while adding plenty of imagined color. And blood and guts, of course. Not pure history, but Herodotus can wait.