Roman politician Marcus Caelius Rufus (82-48 B.C.), whose letters are included in the correspondence of Cicero and who once mounted a revolt against Caesar, now tells his own story. In Jaro's The Key (1988), Caelius narrated the life of the poet Catullus. Caelius begins his ``report'' in a twilit funk in a small town in southern Italy that he's occupied with his men, and where he's cut off from news of the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, to whom he is planning to flee; Caesar's troops are marching down the road to the town. (But Pompey is dead in Egypt.) Introduced by moody snatches of landscape, Caelius' narrative touches on his childhood with a stern merchant father (and a pedophilic tutor), schooling with Cicero, and buddying with such as Catullus and Mark Antony. Then there is the early meeting with the cool, ``silvery'' Caesar, which makes a major impact on Caelius: ``He certainly comes from a good family,'' says his father, ``Aeneas of Troy and the Goddess Venus.'' But a wary wise-head says Caesar would ``do anything to get ahead'' and all say he's ``effeminate.'' Eventually, an agog Caelius will become an aide, running little errands for Caesar as he bullies the Senate and undercuts Pompey, the hero general (he made Pompey's magnificence look ``overdone''). Caelius will follow Caesar—who's left no stone in Gaul unturned— and is there with him at the banks of the Rubicon. But the mighty Caesar makes a mighty pass. What to do? It's expedient to murmur ``yes'' to the powerful and ruthless, but Caelius is atremble with rage and, er, something else. Finally Caelius crosses his particular Rubicon, with disillusionment and doom in the cards. There's little resemblance between this Caesar and McCullough's sophisticated political genius (Fortune's Favorites, p. 958); this flustered Senate and McCullough's beady-eyed manipulators; or, for that matter, this Caelius and history's. In the Renault popular manner: an unlikely tale of ancient Rome.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-877946-39-7
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1993
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 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
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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