A capable, fluent updating of Gibbon—essential for students of late Roman and early medieval history, and easily accessible...
A vigorous history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire—which, as Georgetown University Provost O’Donnell (Augustine, 2005) notes, happened precipitously over three centuries.
Recent historians have been more kindly disposed to the “barbarians” of old than their predecessors, and O’Donnell is in this camp, giving modestly approving notes on Attila (a “bad cop” more than a sociopath), Theodoric and various Huns, Goths and Vandals. He also observes that life in the late Roman Empire was pretty Hobbesian: “People took ill more often [than today], lingered longer in sickness, were crippled for life by trivial accidents, aged rapidly, and died young”—and, as if all that were not enough, lived in a world of human and animal effluvia. If they were rich, those Romans had less effluvia to deal with, for, O’Donnell writes, the rich really were different from the poor, living in a society that “coddled them and crushed the many” and that evolved elaborate social and ideological codes to explain why this should be the natural order of things. Class division, then, was one element of the empire’s collapse; when only a few benefit from life in a given society, then its defenders are likely to be few too. Just so, as O’Donnell memorably puts it, Rome was suffering from a “crisis of illegal immigration” by virtue of its collapsing frontiers and porous borders, to say nothing of those encroaching Huns. Early to arrive were the Goths, who came in peace but, maltreated by the soldiers of the Emperor Valens, replied with force and developed a siege mentality that would serve them well and the empire poorly. Theocratic inflexibility, imperial overreach and the ineptitude of the leadership at other points sealed Rome’s doom as well. In this regard, O’Donnell has a pleasing way of showing how disparate causes can form a perfect storm, as they indeed did, at least from a privileged Roman’s point of view.
A capable, fluent updating of Gibbon—essential for students of late Roman and early medieval history, and easily accessible to lay readers.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-078737-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
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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