The task of determining Seneca’s true nature is daunting, but the wide body of information available to Romm enables him to...
There were many sides to the great Roman philosopher and writer Seneca. Romm (Classics/Bard Coll.; Ghost on the Throne: The Death of Alexander the Great and the War for Crown and Empire, 2011) explores his contrasting, even conflicting, skills in surviving at the dangerous court of Nero.
Seneca was a sage who preached a simple, studious life while amassing wealth and power in Nero’s court. Romm, who teaches Greek literature and language, combed Seneca’s profuse writings in an attempt to identify the true man. Was he a moral philosopher of the Stoic school or a greedy businessman and corrupt power monger? Are his tracts really political treatises, or were they propaganda, expounding his ideals or improving his image? The source material is vast, and the author seems to have explored it all: the Annals of Tacitus, the anonymous play Octavia and Cassius Dio’s Roman History, along with writings by Suetonius, Plutarch and many others. Julia Agrippina the Younger recalled Seneca from Corsican exile to act as a tutor to her son, Nero, who she intended would succeed Emperor Claudius. Working with Nero must have been exceedingly unpleasant. He was a petulant, spoiled megalomaniacal brat likely responsible for Claudius’ death and undoubtedly responsible for his brother’s and mother’s deaths and countless more. Seneca certainly failed to instill Stoic values in Nero, and he had little luck controlling him. He was the speechwriter, spin doctor, and image maker and became a wealthy landowner thanks to Nero’s gifts. “As he himself implied in one of his several apologias,” writes the author, “he was not equal to the best, but better than the bad.”
The task of determining Seneca’s true nature is daunting, but the wide body of information available to Romm enables him to give us tantalizing but ambiguous clues to the man’s mind. Like any good philosopher, he only shows us the questions and leaves readers to figure out the answers.Pub Date: March 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-307-59687-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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