An authoritative examination of “the Mother of All Cities.”
Beyond “the quintessential City of Sin.”
Babylon has not recovered from the bad press it received in the Hebrew Bible and remains an epitome of corruption, according to Llewellyn-Jones, author of Persians (2022) and The Cleopatras (2024). This is nonsense, he adds. It was a great civilization no less cultured than Egypt, China, or Greece. Rivals tended to write on papyrus or skins that rotted away. Babylonians wrote on clay tablets that hardened into rock; scholars have unearthed hundreds of thousands, and more continue to turn up. Most are legal, trade, and administrative records and worshipful descriptions of royal accomplishments, but there are enough diplomatic and personal letters, as well as literature, science, and history, to deliver a vivid portrait of the Middle Eastern metropolis that rose and fell between 2000 and 539 B.C.E. During the third millennium B.C.E., Babylon was overshadowed by the early empires of Ur and Sumer. As they declined, a pugnacious local chieftain began conquering nearby cities, using loot and taxes to benefit Babylon. What is known as the Old Babylonian Empire flourished between 1900 and 1600 B.C.E., peaking under the only ruler familiar to readers, Hammurabi (reigned 1792-1750 B.C.E.), who proclaimed his famous law code. Sacked and destroyed by the Hittites in 1595 B.C.E., it revived only to fall under Assyrian domination after 1200 B.C.E., a confused period that lasted until the seventh century B.C.E., when it flourished for a century, entering popular legend with the exile of the Jews and spectacular wealth but ended forever by the 539 B.C.E. Persian conquest. Llewellyn-Jones writes well, but this is great men and politics history, so he delivers a steady stream of rulers, cutthroat royal infighting, and war. The city was sacked and destroyed four times during its better years, although the Persian conquest was relatively benign. His detours into ancient culture, such as a recounting of Babylon’s legendary Epic of Gilgamesh, may tax the average reader.
An authoritative examination of “the Mother of All Cities.”Pub Date: July 7, 2026
ISBN: 9798897101481
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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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