In an erudite look beyond the Roman Empire’s walls (which he traced in The Reach of Rome, 1997), freelancer Williams examines the frontier of first-century Rome from the Roman perspective and, more speculatively, from the viewpoint of nearby barbarian tribes. After the creation of the imperial Roman state, the frontier became a critical bulwark of pax Romana against barbarian tribes, who lived in a preliterate and Iron Age culture. Without a barbarian literature, Williams is limited to Roman viewpoints, of which he chooses four. The first is that of the poet Ovid, exiled by the emperor to the Black Sea for an indiscretion that can only be guessed at, who left grim narratives of savage head-hunting Sarmatian nomads. Williams’s second subject is Quintillius Varus, a lawyer, who led the Roman legions into one of the empire’s greatest disasters at the hands of German barbarians, the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 a.d. Varus’ legendary defeat at the hands of Armin (traditionally, Hermann or Arminius), a German tribesman and former Roman legionary, showed Roman hubris and overconfidence in Roman arms at their worst, and halted Roman incursions into Germany. The historian Tacitus is a primary source for information on the Varian disaster, as well as on Williams’s third subject, the conquest of the Celtic Britons at the hands of Claudius and Agricola. Finally, Williams uses Trajan’s triumphal sculpture at the heart of Rome as a launching point to discuss his conquest of Dacia on the Black Sea. Though the frontier created by Roman conquests seemed strong enough in the first century, Williams shows that it created a permanent problem for Rome—the continual presence of alien tribes. Two societies, one historic, the other prehistoric, coexisted uneasily, and as Roman military power weakened, the two transformed each other to make possible the creation of Europe. A vivid picture of the clash between ancient civilization and prehistoric cultures. (8 maps, b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-19958-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
Categories: HISTORY | ANCIENT | GENERAL HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
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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