Of some interest to budding classicists and students of world history.
Surveying the survival of ancient Greek culture in the modern age.
British classicist Spawforth, author of The Story of Greece and Rome and other books on ancient history, proceeds from an uncontroversial and unsurprising thesis. “Ancient Greece is present in our culture and society now,” he writes, in areas ranging from government to sexuality to literature. He adds, by way of qualification, that his book presupposes a single Greek civilization “for simplicity’s sake,” eliding the many critical differences among the peoples of, say, Sparta and Rhodes and Athens. Situating most of his book only in the 400s and 300s B.C.E., he allows that there were some unhappy aspects to Greek civilization overall, such as the habit of owning other people, a practice rationalized by none other than Aristotle as part of the natural order of things. “Slavery, violence and what we would call sexism and racism were widespread,” writes the author, which makes those Greeks our contemporaries in undesirable respects. Some of his scholarship seems rather fusty against more recent work by classicists such as Naoíse Mac Sweeney, who holds that the Greeks weren’t particularly concerned with race or ethnicity so much as with “Greekness” versus “barbarianism,” the latter meaning that a person spoke a language other than Greek. Spawforth argues that “among Athenians…the ideal for citizen-women seems to have been fair or pale skin….White-lead make-up could help achieve this ideal.” True enough, but it’s difficult to generalize much beyond the Athenian elite of the time. Elsewhere, Spawforth examines the influence of classical sculpture on modern art; the survival of Greek ideas in matters such as the law and architecture; and the depiction of classical culture in modern culture, high and popular—whether the rather bald ethnocentrism of the film 300 (with “the Persian foe as a preposterous caricature”) or the poet C.P Cavafy’s elegant homages to the Greek past.
Of some interest to budding classicists and students of world history.Pub Date: May 16, 2023
ISBN: 9780300258028
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
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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