A class in Western Civilization that both instructs and entertains.
A masterful account of the causes, preparations for and consequences of the three-day battle in 480 b.c. that claimed the lives of all 300 Spartan defenders of the eponymous pass and those of perhaps as many as 20,000 Persian invaders.
Cartledge (Greek History/Univ. of Cambridge) has published previously on the subject (The Spartans, 2003) and in his latest work emerges as an eloquent apologist of the Spartan way. He notes that among the ancient Greeks—and especially among the Lacedaemonians (aka Spartans)—warfare was not an aberration but an integral part of the culture. Sparta, unlike many Greek cities, had its own standing army, and boys were trained from the cradle to be warriors. (The author also notes that women experienced a parallel form of education that also included physical fitness.) He sees three important Spartan contributions to Western culture: an obsession with competition, a devotion to freedom and a capacity for criticism of the self and others. He acknowledges that the Spartans had no real high culture (art, drama) but that at Thermopylae, their stand inspired allies to rise up and defeat Xerxes’s huge invading army. Accompanied by a chronology and many maps (not seen), Cartledge’s account delays the story of the battle itself until midway—a clear, compelling chapter that describes everything from footwear (the Spartans wore none) to shield-design to flanking strategies. The battle, he argues, was a critical turning point in history. The final chapters deal with the enduring influence of Thermopylae—in poetry (Byron), fiction (Dickens alludes to it), art and cinema (a forthcoming film adapted from 300, Frank Miller’s graphic novel). Cartledge spends some time celebrating Herodotus (whose account of the battle is the most thorough, though not always reliable) and even offers a few thrusts of the sharp auctorial spear at George W. Bush.
A class in Western Civilization that both instructs and entertains.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2006
ISBN: 1-58567-566-0
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.
Jackie Kennedy's secret service agent Hill and co-author McCubbin team up for a follow-up to Mrs. Kennedy and Me (2012) in this well-illustrated narrative of those five days 50 years ago when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Since Hill was part of the secret service detail assigned to protect the president and his wife, his firsthand account of those days is unique. The chronological approach, beginning before the presidential party even left the nation's capital on Nov. 21, shows Kennedy promoting his “New Frontier” policy and how he was received by Texans in San Antonio, Houston and Fort Worth before his arrival in Dallas. A crowd of more than 8,000 greeted him in Houston, and thousands more waited until 11 p.m. to greet the president at his stop in Fort Worth. Photographs highlight the enthusiasm of those who came to the airports and the routes the motorcades followed on that first day. At the Houston Coliseum, Kennedy addressed the leaders who were building NASA for the planned moon landing he had initiated. Hostile ads and flyers circulated in Dallas, but the president and his wife stopped their motorcade to respond to schoolchildren who held up a banner asking the president to stop and shake their hands. Hill recounts how, after Lee Harvey Oswald fired his fatal shots, he jumped onto the back of the presidential limousine. He was present at Parkland Hospital, where the president was declared dead, and on the plane when Lyndon Johnson was sworn in. Hill also reports the funeral procession and the ceremony in Arlington National Cemetery. “[Kennedy] would have not wanted his legacy, fifty years later, to be a debate about the details of his death,” writes the author. “Rather, he would want people to focus on the values and ideals in which he so passionately believed.”
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3149-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.
A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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