A welcome addition to any philhellenic library by a reliable, readable interpreter of the ancient past.
Eminent classicist Cartledge examines the history, mythical and proven, of an ancient Greek city that is often overlooked in standard texts.
Located in the province of Boeotia, Thebes was “almost continuously inhabited for five millennia, at one point the most powerful city in all ancient Greece.” It was unusual in having been founded, in legend, by a non-Greek, a refugee from what is now Palestine named Cadmus, who sowed a slain dragon’s teeth on the city site and harvested a mighty army. Cadmus, the legend continues, married Harmonia, the child of an adulterous affair between the god of war and the goddess of love, to unhappy result: “the near-total (metaphorical, moral) ruin of Thebes and frequent disasters for their mortal descendants.” In real life, Thebes was too close to Athens for comfort, and Athens often waged war against Thebes as a result. It was also relatively close to Sparta, Corinth, and other sometime rivals and sometime allies, and it was in the path of the invading Persians during the reign of Xerxes, when Theban soldiers died nobly alongside Spartans and Athenians at Thermopylae. In the pivotal fifth century B.C.E., writes Cartledge, “mainland Greek history can be seen as playing out within the frame of the fateful Thebes–Athens–Sparta triangle.” The Thebes of history too often suffered loss. Against this, writes the author, stands the Thebes of myth, with an equally unhappy history: It was the home of Oedipus and Electra, yielding what is widely considered the best of all the Greek tragedies, Sophocles’ cycle of Theban plays. Thebes was also the home of the musician Pronomus, who “was the first to be able to play the three harmonies or modes known ethnically as the Dorian, the Phrygian, and the Lydian on one and the same, enhanced (double) aulos.” The cultural contributions were many, but all the same Thebes was overshadowed, and Cartledge’s well-paced, illuminating survey shows why that should not be the case.
A welcome addition to any philhellenic library by a reliable, readable interpreter of the ancient past.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4683-1606-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
This is not an easy account to read, but it is important enough not to be forgotten.
A story of ordinary people, both victims and survivors, thrown into extraordinary history.
Pellegrino says his book is “simply the story of what happened to people and objects under the atomic bombs, and it is dedicated to the hope that no one will ever witness this, or die this way, again.” Images of Aug. 6, 1945, as reported by survivors, include the sight of a cart falling from the sky with the hindquarters of the horse pulling it still attached; a young boy who put his hands over his eyes as the bomb hit—and “saw the bones of his fingers shining through shut eyelids, just like an X-ray photograph”; “statue people” flash-fossilized and fixed in place, covered in a light snowfall of ashes; and, of course, the ghosts—people severely flash-burned on one side of their bodies, leaving shadows on a wall, the side of a building, or whatever stood nearby. The carnage continued for days, weeks, and years as victims of burns and those who developed various forms of cancer succumbed to their injuries: “People would continue to die in ways that people never imagined people could die.” Scattered in these survivor stories is another set of stories from those involved in the development and deployment of the only two atomic weapons ever used in warfare. The author also tells of the letter from Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard to Franklin D. Roosevelt that started the ball rolling toward the formation of the Manhattan Project and the crew conversations on the Enola Gay and the Bockscar, the planes that dropped the Little Boy on Hiroshima and the Fat Man on Nagasaki. We have to find a way to get along, one crew member said, “because we now have the wherewithal to destroy everything.”
This is not an easy account to read, but it is important enough not to be forgotten.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9798228309890
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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