A thrilling page-turner about one of history’s most brilliant strategists and tacticians.
An archaeologist and historian shares his vast knowledge of the life of the leader of the second Punic War (213-202 B.C.E.).
Hunt, a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, displays an ability to teach without preaching and entertain without lowering literary standards, making for an exciting biography of one of history’s greatest commanders. Hannibal was the son of Hamilcar Barca, who led the first Punic War and made his son swear an oath to destroy Rome after Carthage was defeated. Hamilcar believed that Carthage, a society dominated by merchants, capitulated much too quickly; it lost its mastery of the seas and monopoly of trade to the Romans and had to pay a large indemnity. Hamilcar was sent to their Spanish holdings to gather that indemnity from the silver mines, and he took his young son with him. There, Hannibal learned the finer arts of war, which he used to cross the Alps and wage more than 15 years of war in Italy. Drawing on the writings of Polybius and the often negative Livy, Hunt makes good use of primary sources. Hannibal surprised his enemies with hidden armies, relied on his spies and on local Celts, and even employed stampeded cattle with burning brush on their horns to destroy armies. Rome was blindsided by the Punic army and defeated in a series of battles, including the infamous Cannae. What Hannibal didn’t understand is that Rome never considered itself defeated, no matter how many losses they suffered. Eventually, there was one Roman, Scipio, who paid attention to his methods, returned to the Fabian method of nonengagement, and mirrored Hannibal’s mastery of deception and psychological warfare. Scipio actually met with Hannibal before their final battle at Zama in 202 and again in his exile—oh, to have been a fly on the wall at that first meeting. Hunt does his best to grant us that wish.
A thrilling page-turner about one of history’s most brilliant strategists and tacticians.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4391-0217-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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