A readable survey for the nonspecialist with an interest in the ancient world.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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