Clear, concise, well-researched and reasonable—a sensible, healthful lunch rather than a Roman banquet.
On balance, the 44-year reign of Caesar Augustus (63 b.c.–a.d. 14) had positive effects on Rome and its population. Unless . . .
Unless, of course, you were a slave, a woman, a resident of some distant tribe Rome wished to “civilize,” a political rival or a member of any other group penned in by the Pax Romana. Everitt has written elsewhere about notable Romans (Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician, 2002), and here he offers a balanced appraisal of Augustus, known earlier in his life as “Gaius,” then “Octavian.” Although reliable and unbiased documentary evidence for a biography of Augustus is scant, Everitt carefully sifts through what does exist and lets us know when he’s speculating, when he’s inferring. Some of the great names from ancient history appear in these pages: Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, Marc Antony, Horace, Virgil. We are reminded of the details about Caesar’s relations with Cleopatra, the Ides of March, Antony’s various “alliances” with Cleopatra (Everitt doubts the suicide-with-an-asp story), and readers confused by HBO’s Rome or by the Roman plays of Shakespeare and Shaw will find here the balm of knowledge. The author follows Augustus from his fortunate birth (his father was a senator; his great-uncle, Julius Caesar) through his youth and education, his uncertain trials in battle (he seemed always to fall ill when swords began clanging), his increasing confidence and political savvy, his lifelong and quite complementary friendship with Agrippa, his long rivalry with Antony, his marriage to Livia, his emergence as princeps, his rule, his aging, his disappointments and losses, his death. Everitt periodically (and generally unobtrusively) offers mini-seminars on Roman food, clothing, religion, bathing, sexual mores, coming-of-age rituals (including a young man’s first shave—the deposito barbae). Although the author declines to dwell on ancient parallels with our own age, readers will notice many, including, for example, the determination of rulers to silence dissent during a military crisis.
Clear, concise, well-researched and reasonable—a sensible, healthful lunch rather than a Roman banquet.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-6128-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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