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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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