An excellent survey for general readers, refreshingly opinionated without neglecting to give conventional wisdom its due.
British classicist Hall (Greek Tragedy, 2010, etc.) defines 10 characteristics that unified ancient Greek culture.
The author focuses on an individual characteristic during a particular historical period: For example, the Mycenaeans, whose heroes and wars are the subjects of Greek culture’s foundational epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were, like all the Greeks who followed, seafarers. The Greeks’ inherent suspicion of authority shaped their ethnic identity, which began to cohere in the eighth century B.C. around the idea that each free man had equal rights and privileges. (Hall is matter-of-fact about the miserable position of women in ancient Greece but is given to delightfully tart asides such as, “Medea [in Euripides’ tragedy] is the Athenian husband’s worst nightmare realized.”) Their inquiring natures sparked the births of natural science and philosophy as intellectual disciplines in the sixth century B.C. Their insatiable competitiveness led Alexander the Great to conquer most of the known world but kept him from naming an heir and prevented his warring successors from presenting a united front against the rising threat of Rome. The Greeks’ love of excellence and addiction to pleasure are among the other traits Hall explores. It’s a clever way to organize 2,000 years of history, albeit slightly schematic—an impression reinforced by her tendency to frequently recap the 10 characteristics and a weakness for such this-will-be-on-the-test phrases as, “in the next chapter we ask” or “their achievements form the subject matter of this chapter.” These mildly annoying academic mannerisms are trivial in comparison to Hall’s wonderfully rich portrait of Greek culture’s evolution and underlying continuity from the Bronze Age to the triumph of Christianity. Maintaining a judicious neutrality in the modern scholarly wars, the author acknowledges that the Greeks adopted many of their Near Eastern neighbors’ best ideas and practices yet praises them for the unique “cluster of brilliant qualities” not found elsewhere in the ancient world.
An excellent survey for general readers, refreshingly opinionated without neglecting to give conventional wisdom its due.Pub Date: June 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-393-23998-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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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