Strauss sharpens our image of three brilliant commanders and makes military history great fun.
Military historian Strauss (The Spartacus War, 2009, etc.) cleverly exposes the characters of three legendary leaders through the five stages of war: attack, resistance, clash, closing the net and knowing when to stop.
The author effortlessly compares their histories side by side, describing battles with both comprehensiveness and simplicity. Their core armies were seasoned professionals who knew their commanders were the best and devoted themselves to serving them. Even so, Alexander and Caesar suffered multiple mutinies, ruthlessly crushed; Hannibal’s men stuck with him without a whimper for nearly two decades. Fortune was with them as well. They controlled the battlefield with the ability to read their enemy’s tactics, and while they were often outnumbered, their opponents’ armies consisted of raw recruits who had to face battle-hardened troops. The men who opposed them did not hold absolute authority over their armies, but had to answer to higher powers. Alexander’s dismissal of his fleet was almost his undoing, but he was saved by the sudden death of the Persian general and Darius ending his naval offensive. Fabius’ scorched-earth policy effectively put off Hannibal’s attacks until the Senate replaced him, and the generals who opposed Hannibal at Cannae had to alternate days of authority. Pompey believed he could conquer Caesar by wearing his army out with lack of food and fodder. The Senate thought otherwise, and Pompey finally acquiesced to their demands for a final battle at Pharsalus. All three of these men had colossal egos; each thrived in war and made it look easy. They were military geniuses who swept dramatically into enemy territory, but they succumbed to vanity, didn’t know when to quit and occasionally overreached—but they were conquerors, and conquerors are not known for moderation.
Strauss sharpens our image of three brilliant commanders and makes military history great fun.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4391-6448-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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