Not nearly as soporific as most classical studies—a captivating look at imperial Rome’s roots in the making of the modern...
A groundbreaking study of some of the most powerful women in early Western civilization.
Latin teacher Freisenbruch examines how Rome’s leading ladies were expected to perform two millennia ago. Drawing from sources both classical and current, the author explores the biographies of Rome’s imperial women during a 500-year period, from the flourishing of the empire to its demise—roughly 40 BCE to 450 CE. Freisenbruch convincingly argues that many of these women—Livia (wife of Augustus and first Empress of Rome), Agrippina Minor (wife of Claudius and mother of Nero), Messalina (wife of Claudius), Helena (mother of Constantine)—actually figured large in the political rise and fall of their husbands and sons, as well as in laying the foundation for female conduct at the highest level as empress and in subsequent generations of the patrician or senatorial class. Freisenbruch shows that their influence extended not only to behavior but to all areas of fashion—from dress to hairstyle—and commerce, with their depictions on Roman currency often contributing to the political spin of the day. Classical biographers faced with the challenge of constructing a coherent life from fragmentary or conflicting sources must overcome the additional hurdle of having to gaze through the centuries-thick male lens when trying to portray female subjects. Freisenbruch ably rises to the occasion, taking an “agnostic approach to the eclectic array of narrative choices and prototypes that face us.” Providing well-chosen, scintillating details—e.g., enemies being boiled alive, familial bonds savagely snapped in an instant—alongside careful historical analysis, the author breathes new life into these overlooked subjects.
Not nearly as soporific as most classical studies—a captivating look at imperial Rome’s roots in the making of the modern stateswoman.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-8303-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2010
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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