An earthy, vivid tour of daily life among ancient warriors.
Into the fray.
The Roman Empire will likely never go out of style. For the sword-and-sandal set, this book charts the daily life of a Roman gladiator, from morning bread to evening dreams. A lecturer in ancient history at Lincoln College in Britain, Sidebottom writes that gladiators were “at the heart of Roman culture,” discussed by philosophers, cheered by throngs, and admired as “sex symbols”—even though they were overweight and often had “bad teeth, bad breath, and bodies marked and altered, sometimes to the point of deformity, by combat.” The gladiator’s day involved sleeping, eating, preparing for the fight and, of course, demonstrating prowess. Among those shows were clashes with beasts as well as other men. Staged scenes of hunting and of battle offered up symbolic, controlled representations of the two key formative activities of the Roman man. And if the animals let loose inside this diorama of death were exotic—elephants, rhinos, tigers, bears—so, too, were the men. The gladiators often were recruited from the enslaved population, and a spectator might see men from Greece, Iberia, North Africa, and Asia Minor. Readers get a lot of detail, but what they really get is a double history of theatricality and privacy. The gladiator was the object of spectatorship, and his fights and feints contributed a larger, performative quality to Roman life. But the gladiator was looked upon in private, too. No one was ever alone, even when going to the bathroom. (Sidebottom offers an extended tour of the sights, sounds, and smells of the public latrines.) Read this book, then, not just to slake your cinematic thirst for Rome, but for the rich details that show us how these men who were about to die sought to preserve their inner lives behind the public show.
An earthy, vivid tour of daily life among ancient warriors.Pub Date: April 14, 2026
ISBN: 9780593801765
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
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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