On a whole, I enjoyed this book and found Heather to be reasonably competent at justifying his arguments. Despite this, I did have two fairly significant issues with the book. First off, Heather's writing is neither exceptionally engaging nor particularly consistent. On a whole, the experience of reading The Fall of the Roman Empire was slow--what was being discussed was interesting, but how it was presented did not always match this. Tonally, the book was generally "academic". However, there were a variety of sudden shifts towards a much more conversation writing style that simply didn't fit. While short, they were not particularly gripping and always jarring, especially given how suddenly they would appear (and disappear).