There is much to absorb in this significant scholarly achievement, which effectively integrates natural, social, and...
A view of the fall of Rome from a different angle, looking beyond military and social collapse to man’s relationship to the environment.
“The fate of Rome might serve to remind us that nature is cunning and capricious. The deep power of evolution can change the world in a mere moment. Surprise and paradox lurk in the heart of progress,” writes Harper (Classics and Letters/Univ. of Oklahoma; From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity, 2013, etc.) in this astute “account of how one of history’s most conspicuous civilizations found its dominion over nature less certain than it had ever dreamed.” The empire’s very strength, built on travel, trade, and migration, also enabled the spread of tuberculosis, leprosy, smallpox, plague, and other diseases. The kindness of the climate played a large part in the expansion of the empire, especially agriculturally, but the close proximity of humans and animals brought new parasites and diseases. Furthermore, the high level and density of urbanization in over 1,000 cities facilitated the widespread transmission of germs. The empire survived a pandemic in the age of Marcus Aurelius, then a mix of drought, pestilence, and political upheaval called the “Crisis of the Third Century,” or the first fall of Rome, beginning in the 230s. At that time of political upheaval, suddenly the Aurelian walls rose around Rome, coins were debased, and fear enabled the rise of Christianity. Though Rome rebuilt and recovered, more was to come as the climate turned. The empire suffered drought in the southern Mediterranean, especially Rome’s breadbasket, Egypt, and the Plague of Cyprian (250-270) spread throughout the empire. Among many other intriguing hypotheses, Harper proposes that it was Ebola; regardless, it devastated the population and invited invasion by Goths, Persians, Franks, and others at the weakened borders.
There is much to absorb in this significant scholarly achievement, which effectively integrates natural, social, and humanistic sciences to show how the fall of the empire caused the decline of Rome.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-691-16683-4
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist (1900–45) collected his work from WWII in two bestselling volumes, this second published in 1944, a year before Pyle was killed by a sniper’s bullet on Okinawa. In his fine introduction to this new edition, G. Kurt Piehler (History/Univ. of Tennessee at Knoxville) celebrates Pyle’s “dense, descriptive style” and his unusual feel for the quotidian GI experience—a personal and human side to war left out of reporting on generals and their strategies. Though Piehler’s reminder about wartime censorship seems beside the point, his biographical context—Pyle was escaping a troubled marriage—is valuable. Kirkus, at the time, noted the hoopla over Pyle (Pulitzer, hugely popular syndicated column, BOMC hype) and decided it was all worth it: “the book doesn’t let the reader down.” Pyle, of course, captures “the human qualities” of men in combat, but he also provides “an extraordinary sense of the scope of the European war fronts, the variety of services involved, the men and their officers.” Despite Piehler’s current argument that Pyle ignored much of the war (particularly the seamier stuff), Kirkus in 1944 marveled at how much he was able to cover. Back then, we thought, “here’s a book that needs no selling.” Nowadays, a firm push might be needed to renew interest in this classic of modern journalism.
Pub Date: April 26, 2001
ISBN: 0-8032-8768-2
Page Count: 513
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
