An energetic look at a still-misunderstood period in late antiquity.
A history lecturer illuminates the fractious, little-studied period between the fall of the Roman Empire in the West and rise of the Ottomans in the 15th century.
With the breakup of the Roman Empire by Diocletian in the third-century CE into West and East, largely along linguistic lines, two distinct identities were forged over the succeeding centuries and grew increasingly estranged from and antagonistic to each other: Latin vs. Greek and Catholic vs. Orthodox. Brownworth examines the long-maligned Eastern half of the Empire, which saw its capital of Nova Roma chosen by Constantine the Great in 328 CE become the glorious, inimitable city of Constantinople. The author reminds us that the denizens of the East always referred to themselves as Roman, and the term Byzantium was later applied by Enlightenment scholars. Brownworth traces the highlights over the next 1,000 years of violent upheaval and murderous dynastic succession: e.g., early doomed attempts by Julian to repaganize the empire; fighting back the assaults by the barbarians and the sacking of Rome; the golden age under Justinian, who established Roman Law and reconquered numerous lost lands; and meeting the Islamic challenge from the seventh-century onward with holy wars and crusades until the ultimate devastation of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453. While the East held many of the ancient secular texts safe from the so-called Dark Ages that stymied the West, the author concentrates mostly on military, rather than cultural, events. Brownworth delivers just enough of the big picture for interested readers to pursue specific events in greater detail.
An energetic look at a still-misunderstood period in late antiquity.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-40795-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2009
HISTORY | ANCIENT | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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 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
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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