In this crisply written and well-researched biography, Southern (librarian at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, England) presents Octavian/Augustus as an opportunistic genius whose creation of the Roman Empire was more a matter of pragmatic adaptation to circumstance than adherence to a master plan. Octavian, the sickly kinsman of Julius Caesar who became the dictator’s confidant and adopted son, was one of the truly great figures of history. Achieving power at the end of over a century of violent turbulence that saw repeated civil wars among warlords, he created a form of government that preserved the forms of the old republic while allowing him to exercise absolute power over the Roman apparatus of state. Southern shows that, once Octavian was catapulted into prominence, this result was no accident: his unique blend of self-control, common sense, tact, careful calculation, and ruthlessness allowed him to take advantage of the turmoil that enveloped the Roman world after the assassination of his benefactor in 44 b.c. Aged just 19 when elevated to the consulship in 43 b.c., he used his constitutionally exalted office to strengthen his position both against his manifest enemies, the assassins of Julius Caesar who were allied with the senatorial aristocracy, and against his ostensible allies and fellow triumvirate members Marc Antony and Lepidus. Southern details Augustus’s brief and sanguinary role in the battle on both fronts. Following his victories, Octavian consolidated both his power and his prestige: he assumed the elevated name Augustus in 27 b.c., built strong military frontiers, and, while avoiding the trappings of kingship, wielded immense power behind innocuously republican-sounding offices like consul and princeps (first citizen). By the time of his death in 14 a.d., the Roman Senate and people had, seemingly willingly, abandoned all pretensions to republicanism, and constituted an empire in name and in fact. A concise and thoughtful contribution to the literature of one of history’s great turning points.
Pub Date: Nov. 10, 1998
ISBN: 0-415-16631-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Routledge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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