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
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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