A magnificent achievement, making ancient history live in a vernacular for our time.
Inglorious Greeks.
We think of the ancient Greek Thucydides as the father of modern history. He wrote a literate, literary History of the Peloponnesian War that relied on sourced evidence, personal experience, and an argument that the study of the past helps us live in the present. He also shaped great orations less as transcriptions of actual speech than as highly curated, rhetorical performances. Waterfield’s new translation of his history makes voices come alive in idiomatic modern English. Pericles’ famous funeral speech, for example, has a directness that resonates with Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and with the arching cadences of John F. Kennedy: “When it is by their actions that men have proved their valor we are required to show them honor by our actions.” Pericles comes off as a quotable adviser for our times: “For it isn’t easy to find the right balance in a speech when even people’s grasp of the truth is insecure.” Or take this description of the plague in words all too familiar to us now: “The grimmest aspect of the disease was the despair that afflicted people when they realized they were sick; once they had made up their minds that there was no hope, they were well on the way to giving up without a fight.” Thucydides has been used and reused to justify a range of political positions, from virtuous diplomacy to transactional realpolitik. For readers new to the history, the excellent introduction by Polly Low offers a clear guide to the worlds of Greek politics and power and to the tensions between democracy and oligarchy, revealing an ancient world as fractured, as fraught, and as full of personalities as our own.
A magnificent achievement, making ancient history live in a vernacular for our time.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2025
ISBN: 9781541603387
Page Count: 784
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist (1900–45) collected his work from WWII in two bestselling volumes, this second published in 1944, a year before Pyle was killed by a sniper’s bullet on Okinawa. In his fine introduction to this new edition, G. Kurt Piehler (History/Univ. of Tennessee at Knoxville) celebrates Pyle’s “dense, descriptive style” and his unusual feel for the quotidian GI experience—a personal and human side to war left out of reporting on generals and their strategies. Though Piehler’s reminder about wartime censorship seems beside the point, his biographical context—Pyle was escaping a troubled marriage—is valuable. Kirkus, at the time, noted the hoopla over Pyle (Pulitzer, hugely popular syndicated column, BOMC hype) and decided it was all worth it: “the book doesn’t let the reader down.” Pyle, of course, captures “the human qualities” of men in combat, but he also provides “an extraordinary sense of the scope of the European war fronts, the variety of services involved, the men and their officers.” Despite Piehler’s current argument that Pyle ignored much of the war (particularly the seamier stuff), Kirkus in 1944 marveled at how much he was able to cover. Back then, we thought, “here’s a book that needs no selling.” Nowadays, a firm push might be needed to renew interest in this classic of modern journalism.
Pub Date: April 26, 2001
ISBN: 0-8032-8768-2
Page Count: 513
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
An erudite guide to the biblical world.
Revelations from the Old Testament.
“The Bible has no rivals when it comes to the art of omission, of not saying what everyone would like to know,” observes Calasso (1941-2021), the acclaimed Italian publisher, translator, and explorer of myth, gods, and sacred ritual. In this probing inquiry into biblical mysteries, the author meditates on the complexities and contradictions of key events and figures. He examines the “enigmatic nature” of original sin in Genesis, an anomaly occurring in no other creation myth; God’s mandate of circumcision for all Jewish men; and theomorphism in the form of Adam: a man created in the image of the god who made him. Among the individuals Calasso attends to in an abundantly populated volume are Saul, the first king of Israel; the handsome shepherd David, his successor; David’s son Solomon, whose relatively peaceful reign allowed him “to look at the world and study it”; Moses, steeped in “law and vengeance,” who incited the slaughter of firstborn sons; and powerful women, including the Queen of Sheba (“very beautiful and probably a witch”), Jezebel, and the “prophetess” Miriam, Moses’ sister. Raging throughout is Yahweh, a vengeful God who demands unquestioned obedience to his commandments. “Yahweh was a god who wanted to defeat other gods,” Calasso writes. “I am a jealous God,” Yahweh proclaims, “who punishes the children for the sins of their fathers, as far as the third and fourth generations.” Conflicts seemed endless: During the reigns of Saul and David, “war was constant, war without and war within.” Terse exchanges between David and Yahweh were, above all, “military decisions.” David’s 40-year reign was “harrowing and glorious,” marked by recurring battles with the Philistines. Calasso makes palpable schisms and rivalries, persecutions and retributions, holocausts and sacrifices as tribal groups battled one another to form “a single entity”—the people of Israel.
An erudite guide to the biblical world.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-374-60189-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
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