Absorbing adventures in ancient Greece, full of betrayal, friendship, mysticism and science.
An entertaining debut historical novel that depicts tumultuous ancient Greece as seen through the eyes of a young, orphaned slave.
Damian is only 12 years old when his parents are killed and most of his village, followers of Orpheus’ gentle philosophy, are destroyed by marauders from another Greek village in the early sixth century B.C. He escapes with his tutors, but one of them sells Damian into slavery. At first, the young man performs menial labor on a construction site, but when his masters notice his skill at reading, writing, mathematics and running, he’s allowed to train for competitive races and work on building plans. After a spiteful master rapes and cripples Damian, the boy gets his revenge and escapes, and he’s eventually reunited with his beloved tutor, Lysis. The two travel to Delphi, Greece’s spiritual center, so that Damian may undergo ritual cleansing and serve as a tutor at Delphi’s school. He visits the famous Oracle, where he receives an enigmatic message that spurs him to investigate the meaning of his life. Debut author Iannella effectively presents the atmosphere of long-ago Greece, vividly describing its food, clothes, customs, landscape, religion and philosophy. (There are occasional missteps, including characters using the terms “okay” and “guys,” which readers may find a bit too modern, and eating potatoes, which didn’t make it to Greece until some two millennia later.) He also provides intriguing cultural discussions about the wisdom of sentencing prisoners to death versus banishing them, the real importance of good bookkeeping and the evergreen difficulty of teaching fractions. The novel also paints an engaging, well-rounded portrait of the tough-minded historical tyrant Kleisthenes; after an earthquake, for example, he goes where the fires are thickest, using his authority for the most good. The story perhaps supplies a few too many opportunities for Damian to play the hero, which might have been pruned to better effect. Damian’s adventures will continue in a planned second volume.
Absorbing adventures in ancient Greece, full of betrayal, friendship, mysticism and science.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2012
ISBN: 978-1467936392
Page Count: 366
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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