Although the diction (and thus the going) is sometimes a bit dense, the author successfully illuminates the political ideas...
The political ideas of the ancients still endure—and still propel us into debate and even more vigorous conflict.
Lane (Politics/Princeton Univ.) has written previously about the contemporary relevance of the ancients’ ideas in Eco-Republic: What the Ancients Can Teach Us about Ethics, Virtue, and Sustainable Living (2011). Here, she devotes a chapter to each of the eight ideas: justice, constitution, democracy, virtue, citizenship, cosmopolitanism, republic and sovereignty. In each chapter, she reminds us of the Greek and Roman history we have possibly forgotten since our days of Ancient Civilizations 101, then explores each idea in detail, suggesting how that idea continues to resonate today. (The Why They Matter portion of her subtitle could benefit from a bit more heft and development.) Along the way, Lane reacquaints us—sometimes in great detail—with some of the most notable names in political theory and ancient culture: Herodotus, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Diogenes, Zeno, Cicero, Tacitus and Seneca are among the most prominent. Continually, we see how three forms of constitution (not the written documents but the more generic meaning of the word) have risen, fallen and combined: kingship, oligarchy and democracy. The author shows how each held sway in various eras (and in various places and combinations) and how the human desire for power and the persuasive enticements of corruption inevitably corrode and eventually destroy. Lane also explores the troubling contradictions at the cores of some democracies: the presence of slaves, the subservience and subjugation of women, the restrictions on the poor and otherwise disadvantaged. Here, the author’s parallels to the contemporary world are most evident and telling. To provide her readers with context, Lane offers a number of useful charts, chronologies and maps.
Although the diction (and thus the going) is sometimes a bit dense, the author successfully illuminates the political ideas that still perplex and divide us.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-691-16647-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
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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