A fresh, frank reassessment of Plato as a guide to living our best public lives.
Beyond the cave.
Plato has mattered to Western culture for 2,500 years. Most undergraduates encounter him through the dialogues about the death of Socrates, his banishment of the poets from his ideal republic, and his theories of human knowledge spun out of the famous allegory of the cave. This book by British scholar Hobbs rescues Plato from the ossified familiarities of Western Civ to argue that his relevance, today, lies in an understanding of political power, human heroism, and the value of love and friendship. She writes about the external, public Plato—not the philosopher of mind or the theorist of the Forms, but the adviser to rulers and the founder of a form of education. Dialogue is central to Platonic argument. History is central to the present. Plato’s Socrates is, as we all know, a literary persona—and yet there is a personality on Plato’s pages that makes the voice of the old man (who famously distrusted writing) echo today. This book is frank about the loves of the Platonic world. Men loved other men. Desire lies at the heart of public service and heroic action. Learning to be a lover and a friend forms us into fully realized social beings. Perhaps the most vivid of the book’s claims for contemporary relevance is this: “One of the main ways in which Plato still matters, then, stems from his profound reflections on the concept of heroism and the associated notions of honour, glory and fame….The notion of a hero, and the longing for glory, can still have real potency and value: properly formed and guided, these concepts can enlarge our moral ambition and offer us a vision of what the best version of ourselves might be.” Read Plato, then, not just to think, but to live.
A fresh, frank reassessment of Plato as a guide to living our best public lives.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781399403375
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bloomsbury Continuum
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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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