A novel interpretation of the wars that made Rome a world power.
Innovative reading of the last years of the Roman Republic.
Traina, an emeritus professor at the Sorbonne, allows that the term “world war” may seem anachronistic, given its 20th-century context. But, he adds, the struggles that marked that last half century of republican rule in Rome were more than “a concatenation of civil wars”: The conflicts between Marc Antony, Julius Caesar, Pompey, and lesser-known antagonists had reverberations across the vast, far-flung territories that would, in time, become part of the new Roman Empire, from Parthia in what is now Iran to Mauritania, Spain, and Britain. Traina’s world war was not fought with arms alone; as he notes, whereas Pompey was fond of building monuments to himself, his rival Caesar spent his time draining malarial swamps and planting colonies of military veterans across the map while crushing enemies from North Africa to Gaul. In Traina’s telling, one reason for Caesar’s demise was not only that he assumed the mantle of dictatura perpetua, or dictator in perpetuity, but also that “he envisaged an empire whose center would no longer be the city of Rome.” That vision entailed the conquest of the East, with rival generals bent on subjugating what would become the “eastern provinces”—Syria, Mesopotamia, Armenia—and even going so far as to ally with the hated Persians to make it happen. On that note, Traina does a quick reckoning of the rival forces: Cassius’ army included thousands of Persians, Medians, and Arabs, while Brutus’ cavalry was made up of “Gauls, Lusitanians, Thracians, Illyrians, and Thessalians,” and Octavian’s army included a Spartan contingent, “two thousand soldiers who subsequently died in combat.” Rome got its empire, with Octavian becoming Augustus Caesar, and the Mediterranean becoming a “Roman lake,” launching power struggles and local wars across the known world that would flare for centuries.
A novel interpretation of the wars that made Rome a world power.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780691257877
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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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