German cultural historian Burckhardt (1818—97) delivered a series of controversial lectures in the 1870s on life in ancient Greece, now first translated into English to provide a fascinating reexamination of Hellenic civilization. Burckhardt presents Greek society from the Heroic Age to the Hellenistic period through historical anecdotes drawn from texts by ancient philosophers, rhetoricians, historians, and comic writers. Vigorously opposed to the Greeks’ democratic political culture, Burckhardt portrays the polis as a stifling environment, where the individual was completely subordinated to the common cause. The state exercised tight control over all aspects of life, from religious festivals and athletic competitions to education, freedom of movement, and family life, even sanctioning the murder of malformed children. Burckhardt convincingly demonstrates how Greek democracy eventually degenerated into a tyranny of corrupt officials and sycophants that subjected citizens to constant surveillance and threatened them with excessive taxes, property confiscation, and execution. At the core of the Greek mentality was agon, or competition, and each man aspired to supercede others. Victory in athletic games opened the door to political influence and immortal glory. For the ancient Greeks, a harmonious individual excelled in a wide range of fields but never dedicated himself to a single profession. This accounts for the amazingly low social prestige of artists, especially sculptors, whose work required too much commitment. Burckhardt provides interesting insights into Greek pessimism, rooted both in their lack of belief in an afterlife and the oppressive political climate. This pessimistic worldview moved many Greeks to focus on wealth, fame, and physical pleasure. Burckhardt’s investigation concludes in contrast to the traditional idealization of Greece as the cradle of Western humanism: “the blissful golden age of fantasy has never existed.” An instructive excursion into Greek life, provided readers are not intimidated by occasional dense scholarly passages and a fair number of untranslated Greek words.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-19276-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.
Jackie Kennedy's secret service agent Hill and co-author McCubbin team up for a follow-up to Mrs. Kennedy and Me (2012) in this well-illustrated narrative of those five days 50 years ago when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Since Hill was part of the secret service detail assigned to protect the president and his wife, his firsthand account of those days is unique. The chronological approach, beginning before the presidential party even left the nation's capital on Nov. 21, shows Kennedy promoting his “New Frontier” policy and how he was received by Texans in San Antonio, Houston and Fort Worth before his arrival in Dallas. A crowd of more than 8,000 greeted him in Houston, and thousands more waited until 11 p.m. to greet the president at his stop in Fort Worth. Photographs highlight the enthusiasm of those who came to the airports and the routes the motorcades followed on that first day. At the Houston Coliseum, Kennedy addressed the leaders who were building NASA for the planned moon landing he had initiated. Hostile ads and flyers circulated in Dallas, but the president and his wife stopped their motorcade to respond to schoolchildren who held up a banner asking the president to stop and shake their hands. Hill recounts how, after Lee Harvey Oswald fired his fatal shots, he jumped onto the back of the presidential limousine. He was present at Parkland Hospital, where the president was declared dead, and on the plane when Lyndon Johnson was sworn in. Hill also reports the funeral procession and the ceremony in Arlington National Cemetery. “[Kennedy] would have not wanted his legacy, fifty years later, to be a debate about the details of his death,” writes the author. “Rather, he would want people to focus on the values and ideals in which he so passionately believed.”
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3149-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.
A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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