Dennison provides a capable series of portraits, but those searching for a richer analysis of Roman culture and government...
Roman historian Suetonius wrote The Twelve Caesars in the second century, and many subsequent writers have appropriated the title. In this latest example, British journalist Dennison (Livia, Empress of Rome, 2011, etc.) summarizes Suetonius and other ancients (Pliny, Tacitus, Cassius Dio, Josephus) as well as scholars today, who often quarrel with their interpretations.
Lacking strong opinions himself, the author delivers agreeable biographies of Julius Caesar and 11 subsequent rulers. Caesar is a surprisingly attractive character. Although fiercely ambitious, he was not particularly bloodthirsty, often pardoning opposition leaders who later turned against him, Brutus among them. The changes wrought during his few years as dictator strike us as reasonable in light of the disorder and corruption of the previous 50 years. They also struck most Romans this way, and his assassination was the work of an aristocratic minority. His grandnephew, Octavian, required a brutal decade to set things right before taking power himself as Augustus and ruling rather well for 40 years. Of his successors, only one, Vespasian, was popular at his death. Reigns were often short; eight emperors died violently. Domitian, murdered in A.D. 96, was the last of the 12; five competent rulers followed, but for accounts of those, readers must consult Edward Gibbon. Sticking to biographies, Dennison emphasizes his subjects’ upbringings, family relations and personal qualities, which, more so in the bad emperors, includes a wearisome amount of sexual activity, debauchery, murder, torture and betrayal. The author includes a family tree for both the Julio-Claudian dynasty and the Flavian family.
Dennison provides a capable series of portraits, but those searching for a richer analysis of Roman culture and government during this era should read Adrian Goldsworthy or Michael Grant.Pub Date: June 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-02353-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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