In a time when education in the classics is ever scarcer, this is an attractive and learned introduction to a history that...
A welcome survey of the two greatest powers in the ancient Mediterranean world and their bound destinies.
The ancient Greeks, as BBC presenter Spawforth (Emeritus, Ancient History/Newcastle Univ.; Versailles: The Biography of a Palace, 2008) observes, “were migrants and emigrants” who established far-flung colonies and told stories of wandering, not the least of them The Odyssey. The Romans, who admired the Greeks more than any of their other neighbors, were committed to the notion that they had always been at the center of the world, yet were it not for their regard for the Greeks, “the cultural legacy of Greece would not have been preserved and cultivated to anything like the extent that it was.” The author digs deep into Greek and Roman history to find similarities and differences while also considering relations with other powers—e.g., Carthage, Egypt, Persia. Spawforth also considers the nature of Greek and Roman political power, real and imagined, as with Plato, of whose Republic he writes, “how serious Plato was about the achievability of this totalitarian vision is a debate among experts which we cannot go into here.” The author is an uncommonly clear explainer of troublingly complex issues. Why did Julius Caesar break a promising alliance with Pompey? At least in part, he writes, because the more Caesar achieved militarily, the more a jealous Pompey was courted by the “conservative aristocrats” who had long tried to dissolve the partnership. How did Christianity overwhelm the Roman Empire and polytheistic Greece as well? At least in some small measure, via writings that wooed the literate populace in such a way as to “snag the interest of educated Greek-speaking people in the non-Jewish world” by punning, for instance, on the name of Jesus and the verb meaning “to cure.”
In a time when education in the classics is ever scarcer, this is an attractive and learned introduction to a history that reverberates in present events.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-300-21711-7
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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 Yorkerstaff 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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