An essential resource: always reliable and instructive, often entertaining. (20 b&w illustrations)
Just in time for the Summer Olympics, a fresh new history of the games that begot all of today’s quadrennial pomp, circumstance, competition, and urine-testing.
In a deft analysis of the rise and fall of the games at Olympia, Spivey (Classics/Cambridge) fashions a text that varies in tone from professorial to conversational. He begins with the Orwellian notion that sports are war without the shooting, an image he also ends with, then leaps into the murkiest stream of all, ancient history, and attempts to clarify. He explores the Greeks’ belief that citizens should be physically fit—virtually every male worked out regularly; Socrates was a wrestler—and describes the sorts of athletic venues their cities provided. Men worked out in the buff at the gymnasium, which featured spaces for sprinting, jumping, throwing, and wrestling; rooms for bathing and socializing; and opportunities for sexual excitement, if not fulfillment. Not until about the sixth or fifth century B.C. did athletic contests became more than local affairs, the author states, but once they did expand, they became very popular. Only men were permitted to see the naked athletes compete in foot-races, wrestling, boxing, chariot-racing, the pentathlon, and such other events as the little-known pankration, a no-holds-barred bout that proscribed only eye-gouging and biting. Spivey dispels much of the romance surrounding the competitions. They occurred during the hottest parts of the year and offered only the most primitive arrangements for drinking, bathing, and relieving oneself; the games were, he says, “a notoriously squalid experience for athletes and spectators alike.” Describing each event, the author reminds us that in those ancient competitions only winning signified; there were no awards for runners-up. He reminds us, too, that some of our current Olympic “traditions” are quite new. The torch relay, for example, was invented by the Nazis in 1936. Spivey’s later, less compelling, chapters explore the games’ political and mythological significance.
An essential resource: always reliable and instructive, often entertaining. (20 b&w illustrations)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-19-280433-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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