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
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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