A touch on the dry side but a feast for classical scholars.
A detailed history of Rome’s transition from republic to empire, a disruptive, violent process.
Alston (Roman History/Royal Holloway, Univ. of London; The City in Roman and Byzantine Egypt, 2001, etc.) begins with the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C. Caesar’s power was a threat to the continuance of the republic and to the authority of the senate. But instead of ending the threat, the murder set loose forces that gave it new momentum. To put the story in context, Alston steps back more than 100 years, when tension between the power of the senate and the rights of the Roman people led to the murder of Tiberius Gracchus, a tribune. From that point, he follows the course of history through the death of Augustus in A.D. 14. The author argues that recent historians have misunderstood the dynamics of Roman political culture, causing them to underplay the violence of the revolution. He also emphasizes the paradoxes of Roman society that created the opportunities for charismatic leaders to seize absolute power. Most readers, though, will find the narrative more compelling than the thesis. This is an incredibly rich period full of great characters and world-shaking events. The careers of Caesar, Pompey, Antony, Cleopatra, and Augustus are set against the inexorable emergence of a monarchy, carefully marketed by Augustus as the restoration of the very republic he was overthrowing. Alston sets these events in the context of Roman society, examining the effects on the ordinary people and the role of the army. Along the way, even readers with some grounding in classical history are likely to learn a good deal about the era. But while the history is engaging, Alston is working in territory mined by the likes of Shakespeare and Plutarch, tough acts for anyone to follow. Readers not already interested in the history of Rome may find this solid treatment of the subject something less than a page-turner.
A touch on the dry side but a feast for classical scholars.Pub Date: June 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-19-973976-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
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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