alexander the great was poisoned?

[Aemilius Paulus]

I liked how the author wasn't kissing up to Alexander like everyone else

Odd that you say so. I never saw a serious book with the author not tempering the sweet approval of Alexander's early genius with bitter criticism or more accurately, bitter shaming, of Iskander's late "dementia". Every serious book usually starts of with a positive, yet sometimes scolding (Alexander's brashness and impatience) tone and then gets progressively darker - all of which was the reality with Alexandros.

And why in the bloody heck did the Horrible Histories claim "Iskander" is Turkish? It is not. It is Arabic, and I use it to reflect the double nature of Alexander. Alexandros the Greek hero is a shining legend of Hellenic greatness - the most heroic, epic tale of the glorious conquest of an empire to rival anything else. Achilles is the individual of mythology, a single warrior, yet no one greater there is than him. But Alexander is the creator of a Greek global hegemony, the wildest wet dream of the local nationalists - which are quite active these years in Greece.

Iskander, on the other hand, is the stuff with which mothers scare children in Middle Eastern nations. He is a devil, a demon in their mythology/stories. A man of unbridled ambition and greed, a shameless looter, rapist, vandalist, and destroyer. A true embodiment of youth gone wild, of a man corrupted by sin, an unbalanced and dangerously mad figure.