An eye-opening history of Sparta, stripping the gloss from its heroism to reveal a complex grain of power and pain.
We are Spartans!
The Ancient Greek city-state of Sparta has long exemplified ideals of heroism and resistance. The Spartans developed a society grounded in communal life, shared exploits, and military self-sacrifice. The area around Sparta was known as Laconia—the word that gives us “laconic,” and the Spartans were famous for their few words. But many words were written about them, and this book by Bayliss, a British classicist, excavates the literary and historical landscape to build a revisionary understanding of their world. For all their claims to independence, the Spartans were great enslavers. The “helots” were their chattel, farming the land and providing the resources necessary for Spartans to “maintain their status as citizens.” The Spartans should be viewed, writes Bayliss, as “parasites, feeding off the forced labour of their helots.” These helots, too, were hunted down by young men in rites of military passage, and they were conscripted. Yes, the Spartans faced down the Persians at the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C.E. Yes, they challenged Athens. Yes, they shaped a participatory democracy that included women. But they were ambitious for land and power. Anyone familiar with them from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian Wars will want to read Bayliss’ account to find the reason behind the rhetoric. Sparta’s decline stemmed from its jealous guarding of “their conquests and their power,” and its refusal to extend its privileges to others. Bayliss writes, “The only freedom the Spartans were interested in was their own—and particularly the freedom to treat anyone they thought beneath them as they pleased.” Whatever our own fascination with their glory may mean, the Spartans were less the heroes of hope than complex, and at times, monstrous men.
An eye-opening history of Sparta, stripping the gloss from its heroism to reveal a complex grain of power and pain.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9781324117513
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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 Yorkerstaff 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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