by Donald Kagan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 2, 2009
A fresh, thorough reassessment of the enduring significance of Thucydides.
Kagan (Classics and History/Yale Univ.; The Peloponnesian War, 2003, etc.) presents a tidy, timeless distillation of Thucydides’s thought and work.
Although there were numerous historical chronicles preceding The History of the Peloponnesian War, such as the work of Homer, Hesiod and Herodotus, they were often filled with mythological feats and not deemed terribly accurate or objective. In contrast, Thucydides—who lived at the time the war broke out in mid-fifth-century BCE Athens and even served as a general before being exiled for failing to guard the Athenian base at Amphipolis—restrained his personal opinions in describing the events of the war and, writes Kagan, “seems to have taken a spectacular leap into modernity.” In pared-down, limpid prose, the author makes a brilliant case for the relevance of this ancient historian’s work, which grew out of the naturalistic approach of the Greek enlightenment. Kagan takes the reader through Thucydides’s History in terms of his method: to establish the facts, then formulate interpretation, often through the selection of speeches. Thucydides established rather boldly that the war between Sparta and Athens that brought the Athenian empire to an end was more worthy of study than even Homer’s Trojan War. He presents its causes and shows how the great general Pericles convinced the Athenians to pursue a defensive course that proved ultimately disastrous. He also looks at the outbreak of the plague that further eroded Athenian strength and morale, and the dangerous expedition to Sicily engineered by Alcibiades, which ended in a rout. Thucydides has been in and out of fashion throughout history, and while he is not considered the first historian, Kagan rightly calls him the “father of political history,” whose study of war still imparts lessons for today.
A fresh, thorough reassessment of the enduring significance of Thucydides.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-670-02129-1
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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 Yorker staff 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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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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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