Imperial Rome and imperial America have many points in common, writes former Atlantic Monthly editor Murphy (Just Curious, 1995, etc.), not least that both “have considered their way to be the world’s way.”
Murphy ventures nothing new with the mere observation that Rome and America have similarities; even the Founding Fathers thought as much. But, writing with fluency and grace and possessing a solid grounding in the classics, he actually serves up specifics: a telling comparison of the Roman road system, for instance, with our interstates, and of our president’s mode of international travel with that of the emperors and their flying squadrons. Murphy draws six major parallels that, he reckons, ought to serve as warnings and guidelines for better behavior. One concerns military power, with considerable points against the use of mercenaries and auxiliaries, for instance, whether Ostrogoths or the “Halliburtoni and the Wackenhuti.” Murphy does acknowledge, however, that “the most capable, well-rounded, and experienced public executives in America today are its senior military officers, not its Washington politicians.” Another parallel is what Murphy loosely terms privatization, “which can often also mean ‘corruption,’” which is to say, the trouble certain Romans had and certain Washingtonians have in drawing the line between their things and those in the public domain. A further point of resemblance is the executive’s arrogating power unto itself without due concern for senatorial counsel, a habit that yields Caesars now as then. And so forth, all adding up to decline and fall, which, Murphy gently observes, doesn’t have to happen so long as we Americans take a broader view of the world and a narrower view of the Constitution and, even if we “don’t live in Mr. Jefferson’s republic anymore,” start comporting ourselves not as Romans but as Americans.
An essay in the Walter Karp-Lewis Lapham mode that’s sure to irk the neocons.Pub Date: May 10, 2007
ISBN: 0-618-74222-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2007
Categories: CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | HISTORY | ANCIENT | UNITED STATES | POLITICS | GENERAL HISTORY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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