His father, the late Hugh Amory, was noted as the most "rigorous" and "methodologically sophisticated" historian of the book in early America.
Patrick Amory graduated from Commonwealth School in Boston, gained a bachelor's degree in history from Harvard University where he founded the Record Hospital program on radio station WHRB.
Amory's book was considered an "illustration of the recent interest of historians in ethnogenesis"[2] and described as "brilliant and remorseless"[3] by Peter Brown.
The book attempted to up-end the theory of the barbarian invasions and the fall of the Western Roman Empire, via a case-study of individual reactions in the province of Italy, a core region of the Mediterranean culture-province, during a period of intense political change.
The main ideas of the book have met with mixed response, with historians such as Peter Heather objecting to some of its more radical theses.