An engaging, accessible history that, read between the lines, offers commentary on today’s events as well as those of two...
In a timely book of ancient history, an eminent classicist looks at Rome’s decline from representative government to corrupt empire.
What killed the Roman Republic? It wasn’t plague, external enemies, civil war, or corruption, although all of those things played a role. No, writes Watts (Chair, History/Univ. of California, San Diego; Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher, 2017, etc.), author of the superb The Final Pagan Generation (2015). What killed the Republic was its electorate. “A republic is not an organism,” he writes, meaningfully. “It has no natural life span. It lives or dies solely on the basis of choices made by those in charge of its custody.” That electorate chose to trade the freedoms and responsibilities of representative government for the security of the Pax Augusta, for “they came to believe that freedom from oppression could only exist in a polity controlled by one man.” Watts chronicles the death as one by which the ambitions of would-be rulers, bribes offered and accepted, and votes bought and sold all contributed to the arrival of imperial and totalitarian rule. The seeds of destruction had been scattered long before the fact. As the author writes, for instance, even Rome at its height was no stranger to scandals, in one case requiring the unheard-of executions of three Vestal Virgins whose behavior had not, in fact, been appropriately virginal. Still, better angels often spoke, as when Pompey and Crassus, political foes on the brink of civil war, agreed to follow the rules such that “the most powerful men in the Roman state clearly specified that they trusted the system to protect them from their rivals and to allow them to compete fairly within the rules it set." Given that mistrust of institutions is a key ingredient in the collapse of republican rule, as we are witnessing daily, the lesson is pointed.
An engaging, accessible history that, read between the lines, offers commentary on today’s events as well as those of two millennia past.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-465-09381-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
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 Yorkerstaff 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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