A lifetime’s worth of crib notes for late-blooming history buffs.
Unintimidating, adroitly structured grounding in the enduring legacies of ancient civilizations.
Although best known as an energetic medieval scholar (In the Wake of the Plague, 2001, etc.), Cantor (History, Sociology, and Comparative Literature Emeritus/New York Univ.) has made enough previous literary forays into the various civilizations of antiquity so that integrating and contrasting them is a cinch for him. Furthermore, he makes some fairly provocative educated guesses (labeled as such) with ease and confidence. While other academics fret, for example, over why Hebrew society would invent the Jews’ Egyptian bondage—it’s now generally accepted that there’s no evidence for it after decades of archaeological and related scientific research—he suggests that the progenitors of “elitist” Judaism may not have been above laying a guilt trip (“We deserve . . .”) on the rest of civilization. The impact of recent DNA studies on anthropological theory is also evident in Cantor’s conclusions, although he seems to embrace a more extended time frame for the seminal African emigration than some scientists do. The author has helpfully rendered his work in two sections. The chapters in “Basic Narrative” present fundamental information about how major civilizations originated, waxed, and waned in the Near and Middle East, Greece, and Rome. Cantor sees Rome’s decline, for example, as primarily due to plagues during the second century a.d. that killed off irreplaceable taxpayers; he also notes that societies heavily dependent on slave labor tend to stifle their own capacity for technological innovation, a crucial factor in the wars against the Visigoths. The second section, “Societies and Cultures,” probes more deeply into the religions, philosophies, laws, politics, and arts of the same key civilizations. A final case for the melding of Hellenic culture and Judaism as the central pillar of Western civilization is dazzlingly put.
A lifetime’s worth of crib notes for late-blooming history buffs.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-017409-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
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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