Literate and lucid—a fine complement and corrective to the ancient sources.
Lively study of the Peloponnesian War by noted classicist Roberts (Classics and History/City Coll. of New York; Herodotus: A Very Short Introduction, 2011, etc.).
In the author’s telling, both Athens and Sparta, despite having nursed long grudges, entered somewhat reluctantly into the long conflict that became known, “Athenocentrically,” as the Peloponnesian War. That designation came largely through Thucydides, who wrote a magnificent though sometimes-ponderous account of the struggle. Roberts adds to her predecessor’s eye for the telling detail a vigorous prose style: “This was a war that might well not have happened. The king of Sparta had no stomach for it, and his countrymen were anxious enough that they sent to Delphi throughout for reassurance even after they had voted for it.” Allowing people—well, free males, anyway—to vote on whether to go to war was a Spartan custom, not widely shared even in supposedly democratic states. But Roberts allows that, as Thucydides himself believed, things had gone too far to allow either side to back down from war. The author is a stickler for exactitude; here she points out that an ancient account is off, there that the terminology is wrong—the first decade of conflict is called the Archidamian War, she notes, after the Spartan king, but it was really the bellicose Athenian leader Pericles who deserves the rubric. Overall, she does a very good job of sorting out the complexities of the war, which came to involve not just Athens and Sparta, but also allies, willing and unwilling, throughout the Mediterranean, as well as contending ethnicities and, to complicate matters even further, the Persians, who would go on to make trouble for both sides. Roberts also connects the war to later historical developments, such as the forging of treaties among Greek powers in the following century and the crafting of the Socratic dialogues of Plato, whose Republic reiterates the old arguments over which kind of state was best, the Spartan or the Athenian.
Literate and lucid—a fine complement and corrective to the ancient sources.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-19-999664-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
