Goldsworthy questions why Augustus has slipped off of many historians’ lists of great leaders, which include Julius Caesar,...
Historian Goldsworthy (Caesar: Life of a Colossus, 2008, etc.) obviously has ancient Rome in his bones, and his biography of Augustus is also a solid chronicle of Rome and its development.
Born Gaius Octavius, the great-nephew and adopted son and heir of the murdered Julius Caesar, Augustus emerged triumphant from the subsequent brandings, proscriptions and power struggles and was elected as the youngest consul ever. It seems everyone had his own army after Caesar’s death, and Caesar was shrewd enough to realize he needed to rely on talented men like Agrippa to defeat his enemies and take his place during his repeated attacks of ill health. It was also Agrippa who built the new infrastructures in Rome and throughout the empire. In fact, during much of Augustus’ reign, Agrippa did the work and happily let Augustus take all the credit. The author, who consults on documentaries for the BBC, National Geographic and other outlets, recounts the civilizing of Rome and makes sense of the political structure, as well as the strong reliance on family in politics and society. In Augustus’ 40-plus years of power, the empire expanded without the need for war—the reputation of Rome was sufficient to scare off any potential enemies. Augustus and Agrippa instituted new regulations for the army, trimmed the size of the senate, changed taxation, founded the police and fire services, and built roads, aqueducts and bridges. Augustus also made sure to visit each of the provinces. Instituting the beginning of 250 years of peace and stability, he was lauded by Horace, Virgil and countless others.
Goldsworthy questions why Augustus has slipped off of many historians’ lists of great leaders, which include Julius Caesar, Alexander, Hannibal and Hadrian. He provides plenty of reasons why he should be at the top of those lists.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-0300178722
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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