Olympia: A Cultural History

I read a lot of quite varied books, but I found this one very difficult to get through. Technical terminology is introduced without being defined or explained, e.g. "synoikismos". The section of Olympia known as "the Altis" is constantly referred to from early on, but defined only on p. 34. Many terms are given in the original Greek, which I don't read. There are lots of illustrations, but a good number of the photographs are so dark that you can't see what the caption or text tells you is there. In at least one instance (Fig. 16, p. 31), the text refers to "wooden tropaia" ("trophies"), but I can't find anything in the photograph that looks like the "wooden tropaia supports" specifically indicated in the text. References to particular buildings send you to color plates, but these don't have identifying tags, either in the photo or in a caption, so you don't know which building in the photo is the one mentioned in the text. I don't know what this is the fault of, but it's all very discouraging. The blurbs on the back cover are all from distinguished academics, so perhaps they're the target audience. If you're a serious student of ancient Greece, armed with a certain amount of prior knowledge, you'd probably get quite a bit from the book. I like to think I'm an example of the "intelligent common reader," but I finally gave the book up in frustration.