by John Prevas ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2005
One of several recent books devoted to Alexander, thanks to interest spurred by a forthcoming Oliver Stone film: this is...
Young Alexander of Macedon may have been great. But, suggests this fluent study of his final years, he was also nutty, dipsomaniacal, and ragingly violent enough so that across the Near East he is still known as “the two-horned Satan” and “the accursed one.”
Alexander had many talents, writes classicist Prevas (Xenophon’s March, not reviewed, etc.), among them a certain genius and a definite courage that was most useful on the battlefield. Yet, the author adds, Alexander was “incapable of achieving that measure of self-control necessary in order to bring about his own personal happiness.” Whether personal happiness was one of Alexander’s objectives Prevas does not say, but the great lord was certainly content to be considered a god in his time and to be treated with all due awe and reverence by a retinue of sycophants, who followed him as he pressed eastward toward India. Though his most senior general advised him to accept the Persian ruler Darius’s offer to yield Asia Minor in exchange for a pledge not to invade the Persian homeland, Alexander refused the counsel and ended up conquering a wasteland—and squandering the best of his men in the bargain. Frustrated and hateful, he destroyed the Persian capital when he did not need to do so; often drunk, he contrived to “extract the maximum suffering not only from the local people he encountered along the route home [from India, where his invasion petered out] but by inflicting the greatest number of casualties on his men as well.” His men eventually extracted payment in kind: before he was 33, Alexander died at Babylon, and Prevas agrees with other revisionist scholars that he was very likely the victim of poisoning at the hands of members of his inner circle.
One of several recent books devoted to Alexander, thanks to interest spurred by a forthcoming Oliver Stone film: this is also one of the best—a welcome addition to the literature surrounding the renowned conqueror.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-306-81268-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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 Yorker staff 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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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