Strauss’s reconstruction of the events of naval and classical history overflows with detail and writerly attention to a...
First-rate military and political history, focusing on a critically important battle of the ancient past.
By 480 b.c., writes Strauss (History & Classics/Cornell Univ.; Rowing Against the Current, 1999), newly democratic Athens had emerged as the preeminent naval power in the eastern Mediterranean; reports Herodotus, whose words resound through Strauss’s pages, “When the Athenians lived under a tyranny they were no better at war than any of their neighbors, but after they got rid of the tyrants they were the first by far.” Small wonder that Xerxes, the famed ruler of the Persian Empire, determined that Athens had to be crushed first if his forces were to advance into mainland Greece. Well aware of Xerxes’ intentions, Athenian military leader Themistocles urged his fellow citizens to take the defense of the city onto the seas. In early September, the city now evacuated, the Persians arrived and captured the Acropolis after a brief siege, then were lured into sea battle at the Straits of Salamis, where a Greek force of 271 warships sailed against a Persian fleet nearly three times as strong—and made up not only of Persians, but also of Greeks from other regions. The Persians, Strauss writes, “knew that the Greeks did well in war only when united, so Persia’s job was to divide them.” They were largely successful in doing so, but the successful resistance of the Athenians at Salamis helped inspire other Greeks to revolt against Xerxes, even though the Athenians, as Strauss writes, “knew that in spite of the damage they had inflicted on Persia’s ships, the majority of the enemy’s triremes had escaped.” Xerxes went on to other conquests elsewhere. By an irony of history, Themistocles, miffed because the Athenians did not prize him sufficiently, eventually went over to the Persian side, serving as “an administrator in the Persian provinces and a vassal of Xerxes’ son, the Great King Artaxerxes I.”
Strauss’s reconstruction of the events of naval and classical history overflows with detail and writerly attention to a grand story.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-4450-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally unfocused, but redeems itself by putting a vivid, human face on an unimaginable nightmare.
A ground-level illustration of how the plague ravaged Europe.
For his tenth book, science writer Kelly (Three on the Edge, 1999, etc.) delivers a cultural history of the Black Death based on accounts left by those who witnessed the greatest natural disaster in human history. Spawned somewhere on the steppes of Central Asia, the plague arrived in Europe in 1347, when a Genoese ship carried it to Sicily from a trading post on the Black Sea. Over the next four years, at a time when, as the author notes, “nothing moved faster than the fastest horse,” the disease spread through the entire continent. Eventually, it claimed 25 million lives, one third of the European population. A thermonuclear war would be an equivalent disaster by today's standards, Kelly avers. Much of the narrative depends on the reminiscences of monks, doctors, and other literate people who buried corpses or cared for the sick. As a result, the author has plenty of anecdotes. Common scenes include dogs and children running naked, dirty, and wild through the streets of an empty village, their masters and parents dead; Jews burnt at the stake, scapegoats in a paranoid Christian world; and physicians at the University of Paris consulting the stars to divine cures. These tales give the author opportunities to show Europeans—filthy, malnourished, living in densely packed cities—as easy targets for rats and their plague-bearing fleas. They also allow him to ramble. Kelly has a tendency to lose the trail of the disease in favor of tangents about this or that king, pope, or battle. He returns to his topic only when he shifts to a different country or city in a new chapter, giving the book a haphazard feel. Remarkably, the story ends on a hopeful note. After so many perished, Europe was forced to develop new forms of technology to make up for the labor shortage, laying the groundwork for the modern era.
Occasionally unfocused, but redeems itself by putting a vivid, human face on an unimaginable nightmare.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-000692-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
A feast for students of ancient history and budding historians of any period.
A delightful new translation of what is widely considered the first work of history and nonfiction.
Herodotus has a wonderful, gossipy style that makes reading these histories more fun than studying the rise of the Persian Empire and its clash with Greece—however, that’s exactly what readers will do in this engaging history, which is full of interesting digressions and asides. Holland (In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire, 2012, etc.), whose lifelong devotion to Herodotus, Thucydides and other classical writers is unquestionable, provides an engaging modern translation. As Holland writes, Herodotus’ “great work is many things—the first example of nonfiction, the text that underlies the entire discipline of history, the most important source of information we have for a vital episode in human affairs—but it is above all a treasure-trove of wonders.” Those just being introduced to the Father of History will agree with the translator’s note that this is “the greatest shaggy-dog story ever written.” Herodotus set out to explore the causes of the Greco-Persian Wars and to explore the inability of East and West to live together. This is as much a world geography and ethnic history as anything else, and Herodotus enumerates social, religious and cultural habits of the vast (known) world, right down to the three mummification options available to Egyptians. This ancient Greek historian could easily be called the father of humor, as well; he irreverently describes events, players and their countless harebrained schemes. Especially enjoyable are his descriptions of the Persians making significant decisions under the influence and then waiting to vote again when sober. The gifts Herodotus gave history are the importance of identifying multiple sources and examining differing views.
A feast for students of ancient history and budding historians of any period.Pub Date: May 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-670-02489-6
Page Count: 840
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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