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RAVENNA

CAPITAL OF EMPIRE, CRUCIBLE OF EUROPE

Aficionados of early medieval history—and of course Ravenna itself—will learn much from Herrin’s work.

The early life and times of an Italian city that sometimes threatened to overshadow Rome.

Ravenna, on the Adriatic coast near Venice and Bologna, served as an outpost in the days of the Roman Republic. When Visigoths and other outlanders descended on Rome, Ravenna seemed a promising stronghold, “partly because it was considered impregnable and partly because of its large port,” as emerita professor of classics Herrin writes. After the fall of Rome, it steadily gained importance, first as a center of Gothic power and then as a tributary city of Byzantium and an entrepôt with strong ties to the Eastern Roman empire. “This strength,” Herrin observes, “was rooted in its threefold combination of Roman law and military prowess, Greek education and culture and Christian belief and morality.” She examines each of these pillars in turn. Roman power steadily declined over the centuries until Alaric stormed the gates in 410 C.E., but Ravenna remembered the lessons of its rule, eventually establishing colonies of its own in many parts of the former empire, especially in Sicily. More powerful than any other institution was the church, so strong that rivalries with the papal headquarters in Rome were not uncommon. Of particular interest to students of early Christian history is Ravenna’s emergence as a node of Arian worship—though, Herrin writes, eventually that “heresy” would be suppressed at the order of Byzantine Emperor Justin, “a symptom of the much greater intolerance that would later result in outright persecution of minorities.” The bonds with the Eastern Roman Empire would eventually break, but the centuries of affiliation explain why even today so many people travel to Ravenna to see Byzantine art, so widely destroyed elsewhere. Even in later medieval times, adds the author, “the mosaicked churches of Ravenna…continued to inspire transalpine visitors as they became monastic centres, ensuring their preservation while all around the palaces of secular power crumbled.”

Aficionados of early medieval history—and of course Ravenna itself—will learn much from Herrin’s work.

Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-691-15343-8

Page Count: 528

Publisher: Princeton Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 10, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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MARK TWAIN

Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.

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  • New York Times Bestseller

A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.

It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.

Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.

Pub Date: May 13, 2025

ISBN: 9780525561729

Page Count: 1174

Publisher: Penguin Press

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025

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