Not necessarily for general readers, but the author provides valuable insight into Constantine's era.
Scholar Stephenson (History/Univ. of Durham; Byzantium's Balkan Frontier: A Political Study of the Northern Balkans, 900–1204, 2000, etc.) offers a stately though academic biography of the first Roman emperor who converted to Christianity, with a heavy emphasis on the archaeological record.
The author draws on the latest research in this complicated early Byzantine era to fashion a fairly readable work, especially in terms of his treatment of the early spread of “the cult” of Christianity. Constantine (272–337) was the son of an army officer on the rise and a Christian mother Stephenson calls a “barmaid,” who might not have been legally married. As his father's star rose in the Roman military, he and his mother, Helena, now replaced by a more suitable wife, were consigned to the provinces. When his father acceded into the first Tetrarchy, the youth's own military career ensued in earnest and he grew into an experienced campaigner. First incorporated into the second Tetrarchy along with his father, Constantine, purportedly had a vision at the Battle of Milvian Bridge (where he erected the monumental Arch of Constantine) describing the godhead as in Revelations. His defeat of rivals Maxentius and Licinius consolidated his power, and he established Byzantium, rechristened Constantinople, as his capital. Having witnessed the persecution of Christians under Diocletian, Constantine established a reign remarkably tolerant of cults and religions, and he did not attempt to eradicate paganism. He depicted himself on coins as both the new Alexander and new Moses, defeated numerous barbarian tribes such as the Goths and the Sarmatians and centralized Christian authority through his bishops, convening the first ecumenical council in 325, the Council of Nicaea. Stephenson's knowledgeable account pursues a wide variety of historical branches of Constantine's story.
Not necessarily for general readers, but the author provides valuable insight into Constantine's era.Pub Date: June 17, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59020-324-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2010
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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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