Great fun for anyone with even a slight knowledge of Roman and English history and geography—or those curious about them.
A delightful trip from Rome to Hadrian’s Wall—in C.E. 130.
On the surface, the book shouldn’t be that interesting: descriptions of roads long gone, cities renamed, and modes of transportation gladly forgotten. Still, classics scholar and guidebook author Riley (Great Yarmouth Row Houses and Greyfriars’ Cloister, 2011, etc.) has an impressive gift for travelogue. She tells the story of Sextus Julius Severus, the new governor of Britain, an imperial province as opposed to a mere senatorial one. Riley’s descriptions of the roads along her journey will make readers want to visit for themselves. At the mouth of the Tiber River is Portus Ostientis, built by Claudius to hold 400 ships, even the enormous grain ships from Alexandria. A quick sail to Narbonne and passage through one of the three Gauls proves to be a fairly comfortable trek with good roads and hotels. The author deftly tells of alternate routes—and their advantages and problems—to Oceanus, an “immeasurable expanse of sea full of monsters and unfathomable tides at the ends of the earth”—now known as the English Channel. In London, the author takes off on a remarkable story of the towns and roads of Britain in the year 130. The maps and descriptions of the route through London, Bath, Wales, and north to the wall are informative, scholarly, and colorful. Along the way, Riley also discusses the druids, curious offerings to the gods, curse tablets, Roman baths, and other archaeological findings. Of course, the tale of Hadrian’s Wall could make a book on its own, but the author has higher ambitions, and she achieves them in this successful evocation of “a journey to Britain in the Roman period.”
Great fun for anyone with even a slight knowledge of Roman and English history and geography—or those curious about them.Pub Date: May 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68177-129-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
HISTORY | ANCIENT | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
