Scholarly and contextually rich, yet accessible and reasonably succinct.
A fresh look at one of history’s most dynamic and controversial figures.
He intends neither to bury nor overly praise Caesar (100–44 BCE), states Freeman (Classics/Luther College; The Philosopher and the Druids: A Journey Among the Ancient Celts, 2006, etc.), simply to set forth his life and times as ancient Rome’s most celebrated yet often reviled leading citizen. The recovered works of Suetonius, Caesar’s first biographer, do not cover his childhood in an aristocratic family lacking both influence and wealth. Freeman’s willingness to venture educated guesses—clearly labeled as such—on Caesar’s early schooling and training significantly help readers apprehend a human will singularly bent on destiny. The young Caesar who emerges here seems strikingly modern. Ambition and intellect drove every action; his courage was obvious, though frequently calculated for maximum effect. Freeman stresses that while he had the audacity to challenge more senior politicians and sometimes the entire Senate, Caesar always stayed on message when courting public sentiment. He combined a striking instinct for political power with palpable oratorical mojo, and he added the ability to cultivate an aura of military genius, sending elaborate dispatches from the battlefield that were publicly read aloud in Rome—to the disgust of his hapless political foes. Abstaining from moralizing, Freeman frames any judgments of Caesar in the context of his own time, when a reputation for clemency could be gained by cutting a man’s throat before his crucifixion. Caesar made himself enormously wealthy at the expense of both his enemies (selling slaves in victory) and the Roman provincial administration, the author notes, and as the Ides of March approached a man with every reason to believe no one in his world could refuse him was about to meet those who would.
Scholarly and contextually rich, yet accessible and reasonably succinct.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7432-8953-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2008
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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