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
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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