A thoroughly researched, elegantly written history.
Inquiring into the deep sources of British identity.
A classicist and chief arts writer for the Guardian, Higgins (It's All Greek to Me: From Homer to the Hippocratic Oath, How Ancient Greece Has Shaped Our World, 2010, etc.) crafts a delightful, deeply informed recounting of her journeys across Britain in search of its ancient Roman past. Whenever the Romans landed—possibly in 55 B.C.E.—they encountered an Iron Age Celtic society of regional tribes living in settlements of thatched roundhouses. Although contemporary archaeologists imagine the Celts had developed a “sophisticated culture” with “a wealthy elite,” they were unable to resist Rome’s military invasion in 43 C.E. and subsequent encroachment throughout the land. Visiting museums, talking with researchers, and marshaling a prodigious number of memoirs, histories, and travel books, Higgins illuminates Roman presence in Kent and Essex, London and York, Norfolk and the Cotswolds. In Bath, costumed interpreters portray Romans as “friendly, unthreatening, familiar”; Higgins, though, wonders if “there were other stories that might be buried in the stones…stranger and more frightening ones,” stories suggested, for example, by curse tablets, thrown into Bath’s sacred waters, containing “appeals to the goddess of the spring to punish those who have done you wrong.” The author also chronicles her walk along Hadrian’s Wall, built in 122 C.E. and extending 74 miles. “This wall in the wilds of northern Britannia divides nowhere from nowhere,” she observes. Although some archaeologists thought the wall marked the northernmost Roman habitation, recent discoveries show that the empire extended into Scotland. Roman rule ended around 408 C.E.; scholars disagree about the causes and also about the extent to which Britons were “Romanized.” Some argue that “the Roman-ness of Britain was at best a thin veneer,” and others question whether Rome’s “vulnerable military” encountered fierce guerrilla resistance. Unresolved, too, are questions about the spread of Christianity under the Romans. An appendix offers a guide for visiting Roman remains throughout Britain.
A thoroughly researched, elegantly written history.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4683-1089-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
HISTORY | ANCIENT | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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