Next book

THE GODS OF OLYMPUS

A HISTORY

Graziosi’s easy style and focus on the history of the world as told by the gods of Olympus make this a book to savor.

Graziosi (Classics/Durham Univ.; Inventing Homer: The Early Reception of Epic, 2002, etc.) celebrates the longevity of the “cruel, oversexed, mad, or just plain silly” Olympian gods, “the most uncivilized ambassadors of classical civilization.”

The author leaves aside the secondary gods, demigods and Roman household gods but not the soi-disant gods such as Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, who spread the word. This is a study of how the cult of Olympus flourished in ancient Greece and spread through conquest. Alexander was the prime catalyst as he conquered lands from India to Africa and brought his gods along to marginalize the local gods. The library at Alexandria allowed the educated to read and learn from the writings of Homer, Hesiod and other thinkers. Plato first challenged the divinity of the gods, envisioning a single, good, everlasting God as opposed to the radical, cruel gods of early literature. He opened a debate that continued through the Stoics, Epicureans and beyond. When the Romans took Greece, they translated the entire pantheon to Rome. They adopted the Greek culture for the simple reason that it was predominant in the regions they conquered, and they tended to maintain local rule. The leaders of Christianity tried the hardest to topple the Olympians, wooing believers away with promises of eternal life and the resurrection of the body. Ultimately, the gods were turned away but not forgotten. It was during the Renaissance that their presence was felt again, resurrected by poets and taken up by artists and sculptors. Even today, a complete education is based on classical Greek writings, and “thinking about humanity,” writes the author, “must include at least some consideration of the Olympian gods.”

Graziosi’s easy style and focus on the history of the world as told by the gods of Olympus make this a book to savor.

Pub Date: March 11, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-8050-9157-1

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 19


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2017


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • IndieBound Bestseller


  • National Book Award Finalist

Next book

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 19


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2017


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • IndieBound Bestseller


  • National Book Award Finalist

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 Yorker staff 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

Next book

NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

Close Quickview