Stothard is certainly a unique stylist, but the structure and mystifying detail of British politics and personalities may be...
Elegiac memoir of the Tories’ heady heyday in the 1980s among the court of Margaret Thatcher.
When Stothard (Alexandria: The Last Nights of Cleopatra, 2013, etc.), the former editor of the Times Literary Supplement and a devoted classicist, first met Thatcher in 1985, he was still a junior editor at the Times. She was just into her second term as prime minister and was busy cultivating a sycophantic court of powerful men, whom Stothard would soon get to know intimately—specifically, the four “Senecans” of the title who would eventually form a Latin-reading group meeting weekly at a pub in London. Framed somewhat stiltedly as a series of interviews with a young historian, “Miss R,” who was doing a “project” on Thatcher’s era in power, conducted between June and August 2014 as Stothard, then TLS editor, was emptying his office on Thomas More Square in preparation for the company’s move, this memoir celebrates the four now-deceased men—political adviser David Hart, journalist Frank Johnson, playwright and speechwriter Ronald Millar, and playwright Woodrow Wyatt—as versions of Seneca, a Latin writer who became a kind of political speechwriter for the powerful Roman emperor Nero. Seneca, the Stoic whose work partly comprised the group’s Latin lessons at the pub, wrote about everything from exchanging favors to “how to survive in dangerous times, how to live a good life in even the worst of times.” In these interviews, as Stothard and Miss R gaze down on the old newspaper building (in the process of being razed) that had been the site of violent confrontations between the government and the unions during the 1980s, the author contemplates the passing of his brilliant, disputatious friends and mourns an entire era as well as his own youth and newspaper career.
Stothard is certainly a unique stylist, but the structure and mystifying detail of British politics and personalities may be a tough sell for many American readers.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4683-1342-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Worthwhile reference stuffed with facts and illustrations.
A compendium of charts, time lines, lists and illustrations to accompany study of the Bible.
This visually appealing resource provides a wide array of illustrative and textually concise references, beginning with three sets of charts covering the Bible as a whole, the Old Testament and the New Testament. These charts cover such topics as biblical weights and measures, feasts and holidays and the 12 disciples. Most of the charts use a variety of illustrative techniques to convey lessons and provide visual interest. A worthwhile example is “How We Got the Bible,” which provides a time line of translation history, comparisons of canons among faiths and portraits of important figures in biblical translation, such as Jerome and John Wycliffe. The book then presents a section of maps, followed by diagrams to conceptualize such structures as Noah’s Ark and Solomon’s Temple. Finally, a section on Christianity, cults and other religions describes key aspects of history and doctrine for certain Christian sects and other faith traditions. Overall, the authors take a traditionalist, conservative approach. For instance, they list Moses as the author of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) without making mention of claims to the contrary. When comparing various Christian sects and world religions, the emphasis is on doctrine and orthodox theology. Some chapters, however, may not completely align with the needs of Catholic and Orthodox churches. But the authors’ leanings are muted enough and do not detract from the work’s usefulness. As a resource, it’s well organized, inviting and visually stimulating. Even the most seasoned reader will learn something while browsing.
Worthwhile reference stuffed with facts and illustrations.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 978-1-5963-6022-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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