An intelligent study of a shadowy empire.
Early Rome’s bitter rival.
MacDonald, senior lecturer at Cardiff University and author of Hannibal: A Hellenistic Life, has not chosen a generously endowed historical subject. Rome defeated Carthage in three wars, razed its capital in 146 B.C.E., and then wrote all the histories. Scholars agree that while the Roman cities and empire dominated the western Mediterranean, the original Carthaginians were Phoenician-speaking people from the east, related to the Canaanites of the Hebrew Bible. Great seafarers and traders, they sailed widely, beginning in the first millennium B.C.E., settling and establishing cities throughout the Mediterranean. By 300 B.C.E., they dominated a patchwork of colonies, vassals, and satellite states across North Africa, Iberia, and the Mediterranean islands. This was the period when Rome completed its conquest of the Italian peninsula and cast an eye on Sicily, then partly occupied by Carthage. MacDonald admits the difficulties of specializing in Carthage because Rome demolished it so thoroughly that essentially no documents survive. The author pays close attention to archeology, which reveals clues to Carthaginian culture, but mostly relies on surviving accounts from Greco-Roman writers whose readership had no doubt that Carthage deserved its fate. Combined with the fact that the ancients admired warriors more than we do, histories of Carthage mostly describe preparations for war, war, and preparations for the next war. The result is that this is largely an account of the Punic Wars. In the first, Rome expelled Carthage from Sicily. The second describes Hannibal’s brilliant descent on Italy from the Alps, his dazzling victories, and his ultimate defeat. In the third, a nasty business, Rome determined to obliterate its rival. Few readers will complain: A serious scholar, the author has no problem admitting that many ancient historical controversies will never be resolved, and she writes well.
An intelligent study of a shadowy empire.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781324123279
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
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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