The authors succeed brilliantly in bringing this fascinating statesman to life.
Insightful biography of Cato (95 B.C.–46 B.C.), enemy of Julius Caesar.
Goodman and Huffington Post managing editor Soni write not from the viewpoint of academic historians, but rather as students of the classics who want to pass on the rich history of Rome from the time of Sulla to the death of Caesar. They carefully cite all the classic works that the non-Latin reading public may have missed. Plutarch’s biography of Cato is the most detailed, but the authors diligently temper his didactic history with facts gleaned from a wealth of sources. Cato devoted his life to stoicism even though his grandfather fought to ban the rigid Hellenic philosophy. During Cato’s time, Rome suffered from homegrown terrorism, a debt crisis, multiple foreign wars and a widening economic gap. He raged against corruption brought on by wealth and empire and desperately fought for limited government. Most particularly, he fought against both Pompey and Caesar in their struggles to control Rome. He disliked Pompey, but his greatest fear, soon to be realized, was the reign of Caesar. Few of Cato’s writings survive, so his legend comes largely from the near-deification by those who began to write about him after his disturbing suicide. Cicero, who both knew and fought with Cato, was the first to laud his political legacy; from there it never stopped. Virgil, Caesar, Seneca and Augustine wrote about Cato. Dante paid him the ultimate compliment in making Cato one of only four pagans who escaped hell in the Divine Comedy. Joseph Addison’s Cato, A Tragedy was required reading throughout the 18th century, and George Washington carried it with him and had it staged at Valley Forge.
The authors succeed brilliantly in bringing this fascinating statesman to life.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-68123-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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