Abulafia (Mediterranean History/Cambridge Univ.; The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus, 2008, etc.) provides a “history of the Mediterranean Sea, rather than a history of the lands around it.”
In this massive companion piece to The Mediterranean in History (2003), the author looks at the role played by trade, as opposed to physical migration of populations, in diffusing cultures and religion, as well as that of naval warfare and conquest. Abulafia weighs in on the dispute over the origins of the Etruscans who preceded the Romans and built the first cities in Italy. Had they migrated from the east, as Latin writers such as Virgil and Cicero supposed, or were they indigenous to the region? For the author, the important question is “how their distinctive culture came into being in Italy”—the diffusion of objects, standards of taste, religious cults, etc. The author looks at five distinct stages in the culture of the Mediterranean: 22000 to 1000 BCE, when progress was punctuated by a series of natural disasters; 1000 BCE to 600 CE, which encompasses the great cultures of antiquity and the rise of Judaism and Christianity; 600-1350, during which the Roman Empire fell and Islam rose; 1350-1830, dominated by the Ottoman empire and the Crusades; and 1830-2010, featuring the expansion of the British empire whose acquisitions stretched from Gibraltar to Suez in the modern period. Abulafia writes in a popular style with an eye for interesting sidelights on history, such as the backdating of the Trojan War by Homer and Virgil, and quirky asides about modern Mediterranean culture. Whether or not readers agree with the author that the Mediterranean “has played a role in the history of civilization that has far surpassed any other expanse of sea,” this comprehensive, scholarly study contains much food for thought.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-19-532334-4
Page Count: 816
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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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