A sensitive, spirited investigation of the ancient world.
The Roman Empire comes to life through the biographies of two influential men.
Classicist Dunn (Catullus' Bedspread: The Life of Rome's Most Erotic Poet, 2016, etc.) creates a vivid tapestry of the Roman world focused on naturalist Pliny the Elder (23/24-79 C.E.), who perished when Vesuvius erupted, and his nephew—and adopted son—Pliny the Younger (c. 62-133 C.E.), a lawyer, senator, landowner, and poet who lived “at the very center of things in the first and early second centuries.” Drawing largely on the Elder’s encyclopedic, 37-volume Natural History and the Younger’s prolific letters and speeches, Dunn depicts them as “Renaissance men in their own time,” revered among their peers and by later generations. Darwin, for example, a member of the Plinian Society as a medical student, owned a "well skimmed translation” of Natural History, which influenced his thinking about heredity. Although both Plinys shared “an enquiring mind, an eye for minutiae, obsessive diligence,” and a “love of stories, not only of the natural world, but of extremes of human behavior,” the younger man could be pompous, self-centered, “attuned to detail and hard fact, obedient to protocol. Where his uncle was creative,” Dunn notes, “Pliny was pedantic.” He worked happily in solitude, preferring his rural villas—served by some 500 slaves—to the bustle of the city. Like his uncle—and also Cicero, Virgil, and Emperor Marcus Aurelius, among many other prominent Romans—Pliny adhered to Stoicism, “a philosophy for achieving equilibrium in a frantic world, through which you learned to become master of yourself and your emotions.” Besides exploring his philosophical beliefs, Dunn examines Pliny’s attitudes about medicine, agriculture, and marital relations along with his role in the political intrigues and rivalries that marked the reigns of the cruel Emperor Domitian, who exiled philosophers from Italy, and Emperor Trajan, a popular ruler for whom Pliny served as deputy. Their correspondence reveals the tensions that arose from the burgeoning of Christianity, portending “a change that was to come at the heart of Rome’s empire.”
A sensitive, spirited investigation of the ancient world.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63149-639-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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