An engrossing account of how the Roman Empire grew and operated.
An exploration of the “Roman Peace,” which held “sway over much of Western Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa for centuries.”
The world has entered what some call the Pax Americana. Everyone knows that this phrase refers to ancient Rome, but it’s meant ironically because empires are now assumed to be despotic. Before World War II, empires enjoyed good press, and ancient Romans shared many Americans’ conviction that anyone with good sense wanted to be like them. In this thick but entirely compelling account, acclaimed British historian Goldsworthy (Augustus: First Emperor of Rome, 2014, etc.), who has written extensively about the Roman Empire, explains how it enforced genuine and long-lasting, if not idyllic, peace. From its founding in the eighth century B.C.E., the Italian town expanded by beating up on its neighbors, but Rome was unusual not because of its pugnacity but because of its success. Unwarlike societies in Iron Age Europe quickly vanished. “The Roman Republic celebrated military achievement as the greatest service of the state,” writes the author, “and mobilized extremely large resources…to wage war virtually every year.” After 150 B.C.E., having crushed Carthage and Macedonia, it ruled the western Mediterranean and began moving east. Expansion continued despite brutal civil wars that ended when Augustus became emperor in 27 B.C.E., the traditional beginning of Pax Romana, which lasted more than two centuries. The empire continued to expand, but wars tended to be at the frontier. As long as taxes arrived, provincial elites were allowed to govern according to local customs, and most of the empire was peaceful most of the time. Goldsworthy rightly reminds readers that external forces destroyed Rome. Unlike recent empires (British, French, Soviet), its colonies never rose up to demand freedom. They wanted to remain Roman.
An engrossing account of how the Roman Empire grew and operated.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-300-17882-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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