A well-crafted and indeed short history of the three centuries between the death of Alexander the Great and Rome’s final conquest of the eastern Mediterranean.
As Green (Emeritus, Classics/Univ. of Texas) observes, the Hellenistic age is a category invented by historians, not the people who lived in it, and whatever material evolution and wealth ensued from it was to the benefit of only a few. (As for social strata and progress, he writes, the rule of thumb is, “The lower, the slower.”) Alexander the Macedonian boy wonder conquered half the ancient world at the dawn of the age, but when he died in Babylon, his empire instantly fell apart, contested by rival lieutenants. Green finds it noteworthy as well that the empire was not forged by an alliance of the willing—far from it; the Greeks contributed only a few thousand soldiers to the campaign, “a tiny fragment of what was actually available.” The “Persian other” began to disappear with the chaos, with new enemies closer to home, from Seleucids to Celts. When the rivals died off, a balance of power was struck: Three post-Alexandrian worlds evolved in Europe, Asia and Egypt, though all were characterized by increasingly urban societies, a process that accelerated with the continued development of strong city-states. The greatest and most interesting of these may have been Alexandria, a place where “commercial success and intellectual panache” ruled. The flowering of Egypt and the Near East ended with the arrival of the Romans, who were concerned not to be seen as barbarians but who definitely had an aggressive way of adding to their territories. “As colonial rulers,” Green writes, “the Romans neither bothered much with benefactions nor showed any real interest in democracy.” Neither did Marc Antony and Cleopatra, whose attempt to re-create the empire of Alexander ended rather badly for both.
A readable survey for the nonspecialist with an interest in the ancient world.Pub Date: April 10, 2007
ISBN: 0-679-64279-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Modern Library
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2007
Categories: HISTORY | ANCIENT | GENERAL HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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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
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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