A welcome broadening of our understanding of antiquity.
In the ancient world, there was a remarkably diverse environment of ideas, knowledge, and beliefs existing among the Mediterranean, the Middle East, India, and China. Scott (Classics and Ancient History/Univ. of Warwick; Delphi: A History of the Center of the Ancient World, 2014, etc.) focuses on developing relationships between and within communities from the 6th century B.C.E. to the 5th century C.E. That period was characterized by a significant rethinking of political ideas, societal governance, and interpersonal relationships. The author divides the book into three sections covering political systems, wars, and religion. Of course, the earlier in time a historian searches for sources, the fewer are available, but Scott boldly dives into any and all sources. What little is available was written long after events and was influenced by the chroniclers’ time and tendencies. Many readers of Western history are woefully ignorant of events in China, India, Bactria, and the Seleucid and Ptolemaic empires. In this period, wars and political strife did not necessarily lead to collapse. Instead, within the chaos, societies evolved and mutated into fragile new ideologies, subject to both growth and revision. As Antiochus III drove Ptolemy IV out of the Levant, Hannibal almost took over the Roman Empire and Philip V of Greece pretty much got nowhere except to keep switching alliances. In China, the head of the Qin state rejected Confucianism for its opposite, legalism, until it was replaced by the Han dynasty. While violent wars tied ancient worlds together, only two great empires emerged with nothing but instability between. The nomadic peoples, by nature moving with all their goods, also brought religion, from China into India as Christianity moved east across the Silk Road.
Scott teaches us that the past is a work in progress influenced by political and religious ideas and powerful rulers and individuals, and he proves that we need to continue to study and learn.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-465-09472-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Basic
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
Categories: HISTORY | ANCIENT | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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