A lucid, readable work on a key aspect of ancient infrastructure and its survivals.
Wide-ranging history of ancient Rome’s globe-spanning network of roads.
“What have the Romans ever done for us?” asks John Cleese’s freedom fighter in the Monty Python film Life of Brian. “The roads,” answers another rebel. The reply: “Well, yes, obviously the roads…the roads go without saying.” Observes British historian Fletcher, the roads that Rome built extended from Scotland to Iraq, and many still exist, whether for a kilometer or so as archaeological curiosities or charting the course for modern superhighways such as Italy’s Strada Statale or state road 7, which follows the straight-line layout of its predecessor, the Via Appia, which famously extends to Rome. “Barely a week goes by without a report on a newly discovered Roman road,” Fletcher notes. By her account that would seem especially true in Britain, where every new parking lot or building foundation seems to turn up imperial paving stones. The roads were more than conveniences for trade and the movement of military forces, though they were certainly both: Fletcher reckons that a walker on a good Roman road might make 20 miles a day—a rhythm so regular that Roman court dates were set according to how far a litigant had to walk to get there—while a rider on horseback could make 50 to 80 miles a day. Beyond that, the roads were symbols and projections of imperial power, and a safeguard: any enemy attacking Rome would soon find legions arrayed against it. Later observers such as Leonardo da Vinci were fascinated by the remnants, and when Mussolini tried to launch an empire of his own, he set to work rebuilding Rome’s network of roads (though on the famed March to Rome, Fletcher chortles, “Mussolini himself…took the train to the outskirts”).
A lucid, readable work on a key aspect of ancient infrastructure and its survivals.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781639367603
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
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 Yorker staff 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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