by Daisy Dunn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 10, 2019
A sensitive, spirited investigation of the ancient world.
The Roman Empire comes to life through the biographies of two influential men.
Classicist Dunn (Catullus' Bedspread: The Life of Rome's Most Erotic Poet, 2016, etc.) creates a vivid tapestry of the Roman world focused on naturalist Pliny the Elder (23/24-79 C.E.), who perished when Vesuvius erupted, and his nephew—and adopted son—Pliny the Younger (c. 62-133 C.E.), a lawyer, senator, landowner, and poet who lived “at the very center of things in the first and early second centuries.” Drawing largely on the Elder’s encyclopedic, 37-volume Natural History and the Younger’s prolific letters and speeches, Dunn depicts them as “Renaissance men in their own time,” revered among their peers and by later generations. Darwin, for example, a member of the Plinian Society as a medical student, owned a "well skimmed translation” of Natural History, which influenced his thinking about heredity. Although both Plinys shared “an enquiring mind, an eye for minutiae, obsessive diligence,” and a “love of stories, not only of the natural world, but of extremes of human behavior,” the younger man could be pompous, self-centered, “attuned to detail and hard fact, obedient to protocol. Where his uncle was creative,” Dunn notes, “Pliny was pedantic.” He worked happily in solitude, preferring his rural villas—served by some 500 slaves—to the bustle of the city. Like his uncle—and also Cicero, Virgil, and Emperor Marcus Aurelius, among many other prominent Romans—Pliny adhered to Stoicism, “a philosophy for achieving equilibrium in a frantic world, through which you learned to become master of yourself and your emotions.” Besides exploring his philosophical beliefs, Dunn examines Pliny’s attitudes about medicine, agriculture, and marital relations along with his role in the political intrigues and rivalries that marked the reigns of the cruel Emperor Domitian, who exiled philosophers from Italy, and Emperor Trajan, a popular ruler for whom Pliny served as deputy. Their correspondence reveals the tensions that arose from the burgeoning of Christianity, portending “a change that was to come at the heart of Rome’s empire.”
A sensitive, spirited investigation of the ancient world.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63149-639-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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SEEN & HEARD
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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