Well informed, chatty and opinionated.
Bestselling historian Cantor (Antiquity, 2003, etc.) provides a fantasy-free study of the richly gifted, seriously flawed Macedonian whose dozen years of military conquests yielded immortality.
His assessment of Alexander’s personal proclivities may well underscore why the recent Hollywood offering directed by Oliver Stone, similarly frank with regard to sex, failed to win audiences. Though Cantor calls Alexander “undoubtedly bisexual” and cites his several wives, in the end the author concludes that Alexander “had a lifelong gay lover” and had almost nothing to do with women. Cantor stresses in the same breath that the pre-Christian world, unlike today’s box office, would have assigned no stigma to bedroom liaisons with juvenile male prostitutes. Of the many sources he cites, including Roman archivists, all affirm Alexander’s personal courage and martial genius. During his brief but spectacular tenure (336–23 b.c.) as ruler of Macedonia and field commander of its armed forces, he combined verve with military cunning. The author contends, however, that Alexander’s initial defeat of Persia, which provided him both the impetus for further subjugation and the treasury to pay the thousands of mercenaries who marched with him, was abetted by King Darius’s failure to take the Macedonian threat seriously. Darius could have assembled a force so numerically superior as to be unbeatable, but he didn’t. Thus Alexander’s push all the way to India became legend, and part of the glory that was Greece as resurrected and codified mostly by British Victorians. Not bad, Cantor implies, for a merciless militarist who once killed a close friend while in a drunken stupor and probably died clinically insane.
Well informed, chatty and opinionated.Pub Date: Dec. 31, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-057012-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2005
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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