Strauss’s reconstruction of the events of naval and classical history overflows with detail and writerly attention to a...
First-rate military and political history, focusing on a critically important battle of the ancient past.
By 480 b.c., writes Strauss (History & Classics/Cornell Univ.; Rowing Against the Current, 1999), newly democratic Athens had emerged as the preeminent naval power in the eastern Mediterranean; reports Herodotus, whose words resound through Strauss’s pages, “When the Athenians lived under a tyranny they were no better at war than any of their neighbors, but after they got rid of the tyrants they were the first by far.” Small wonder that Xerxes, the famed ruler of the Persian Empire, determined that Athens had to be crushed first if his forces were to advance into mainland Greece. Well aware of Xerxes’ intentions, Athenian military leader Themistocles urged his fellow citizens to take the defense of the city onto the seas. In early September, the city now evacuated, the Persians arrived and captured the Acropolis after a brief siege, then were lured into sea battle at the Straits of Salamis, where a Greek force of 271 warships sailed against a Persian fleet nearly three times as strong—and made up not only of Persians, but also of Greeks from other regions. The Persians, Strauss writes, “knew that the Greeks did well in war only when united, so Persia’s job was to divide them.” They were largely successful in doing so, but the successful resistance of the Athenians at Salamis helped inspire other Greeks to revolt against Xerxes, even though the Athenians, as Strauss writes, “knew that in spite of the damage they had inflicted on Persia’s ships, the majority of the enemy’s triremes had escaped.” Xerxes went on to other conquests elsewhere. By an irony of history, Themistocles, miffed because the Athenians did not prize him sufficiently, eventually went over to the Persian side, serving as “an administrator in the Persian provinces and a vassal of Xerxes’ son, the Great King Artaxerxes I.”
Strauss’s reconstruction of the events of naval and classical history overflows with detail and writerly attention to a grand story.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-4450-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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