It’s Alexander fever time, with two new movies and a slew of books celebrating the renowned conqueror. But this is a minor...
Alexander the Great wasn’t a nice guy.
No, writes historical novelist Doherty (The Gates of Hell, 2003, etc.), he was a wastrel, ill-tempered, a drunk. Reportedly, he conquered most of the known world while snockered, when “he would sometimes become offensive, sneering and arrogant. He would then sleep often until midday and sometimes for the whole of the following day,” as Plutarch noted. He was also drunk, many ancient sources tell us, when he died at the tender age of 33; one of them specifies that, having occupied the great city of Babylon, near modern-day Baghdad, he drank six quarts of wine, began to feel unwell, drank a few more quarts, and then expired. Other sources suggest that Alexander fell ill after being repeatedly bitten by mosquitoes along the swampy Euphrates River, which has led some modern epidemiologists to posit that Alexander died of some ancestral West Nile virus. But Doherty prefers an explanation that few contemporary sources admit. Alexander tempted fate with his desire to prove his invincibility: “Tens upon thousands of men, women and children paid the price for this. Alexander destroyed their cities and their cultures, bringing them to an end in an orgy of rape, torture, killing or slavery.” He thus made plenty of enemies. Worse—for such behavior was common in the ancient world—he taught his lieutenants the fine art of brutality, and they returned the favor by murdering him, whereupon the nicer Ptolemy took over. That there is slender evidence for such a conspiracy doesn’t sway Doherty; nor does the fact that the chroniclers on whom he relies most heavily lived hundreds of years after Alexander’s time. Still, it makes for a good theory, if one that may not sway purists who prefer the wine-and/or-virus take on Alexander’s death.
It’s Alexander fever time, with two new movies and a slew of books celebrating the renowned conqueror. But this is a minor contribution at best, of much less interest than Paul Cartledge’s Alexander the Great: A New Life (p. 721).Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7867-1340-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
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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