by Anthony R. Birley ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 8, 1997
In the first scholarly biography of Hadrian (76138 a.d.) since Bernard Henderson's 1923 work, German historian Birley examines the personal life and cultural and state achievements of the emperor who Hellenized and consolidated the Roman Empire. Drawing on the Historia Agusta and other Latin sources, Birley traces the life of Hadrian, a Roman of senatorial rank and Spanish origin whose career rose with that of his uncle Trajan. Trajan spent much of his time with his legions at the frontier, and Hadrian himself headed several legions. After Trajan became emperor, Hadrian assisted his uncle in the conquest of the Dacians, after which the Roman Empire expanded to its greatest breadth, and married Trajan's granddaughter, Vibia Sabina. Significantly for his future role as a promoter of Greek culture, Hadrian served as archon of Athens and was put in command of the army of Syria and adopted as Trajan's heir shortly before the emperor's death. Birley shows that Hadrian himself was both peripatetic and vigorous as ruler in consolidating his position around the empire, developing his eponymous wall in Britain, negotiating a peace with the Parthians, and putting down rebellions in Judaea (occasioned by his own unsuccessful attempt to Hellenize the Jews). Deeply interested in Greek architecture and culture, he became personally involved in massive building projects and wrote poetry, some of which has survived. Birley also traces Hadrian's celebrated homosexual relationship with the youth Antinous: When the boy died after falling into the Nile in 130 a.d., Hadrian became disconsolate. A person of mercurial character, he died after a long illness, hated by many but having left a remarkable stamp on the culture and character of the empire. An excellent, and long overdue, biography of one of the greatest and most accomplished of the Roman emperors. (8 line drawings, 38 b&w photos)
Pub Date: Dec. 8, 1997
ISBN: 0-415-16544-X
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Routledge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1997
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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