A cogent case to reject wishful-thinking rightist presentism when studying the classics.
An examination of the far right’s hijacking of the classical tradition for modern political ends.
As Vassar classicist Dozier observes, white supremacism has long looked to ancient Greece and Rome to justify the insupportable: the separation of humans into races and the necessity of hierarchy, which “means that white people should rule over others, and inferior people should accept this.” Troublingly, there is some rationale for this: Aristotle took slavery as inevitable, Cicero was loudly antisemitic, Propertius was a proto-incel, and so forth. Moreover, classical scholars have themselves provided grist for the supremacist mill: A Johns Hopkins professor of a century back argued that “the orientalization of Rome’s populace” lead to “a weakening of moral and political stamina,” which is just the sort of thing that right-wing organizations have argued in defense of closing U.S. borders. (Will and Ariel Durant, who propounded “xenophobic interpretations of the end of the Roman Empire,” got greater traction out of the argument.) Equating America with ancient Rome is an old trope, and so is the inevitable lament that, just as Rome collapsed, so the United States is in inexorable decline. Yet, as Dozier notes, the supremacists miss certain key points, among them the fact that yesterday’s civilizations would not recognize today’s racial classifications, which knocks a strut or two away from the idea that the so-called Great Replacement theory has classical validity. So it is with the simplistic notion that Rome’s loss of its “ethnic homogeneity”—which it never had—“contributed to a decline in the qualities that established and maintained Roman power.” In the end, Dozier urges, the idea that classical civilizations can be enlisted in support of “modern systems of oppression and violence” is willfully wrongheaded.
A cogent case to reject wishful-thinking rightist presentism when studying the classics.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9780300272734
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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 Yorkerstaff 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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