The ancient routes of Rome come alive in this appealing new history.
Traveling with the Caesars, Cicero, and Horace along Roman byways.
At the apex of its power, the Roman Empire had 50,000 miles of paved roads. Constructed chiefly for military purposes, some 372 roads connected the empire’s 113 provinces, from Britain to Mesopotamia and from the Danube River to Spain and North Africa. Nearly 30 roads left Rome itself. Keahey, the author of Seeking Sicily and Venice Against the Sea, begins much earlier, with the extraordinary achievement of the Roman Republic in building three ancient routes: the Via Appia, Via Egnatia, and Via Traiana. The author devotes most of the book to the first and most famous route—the Appian Way—and to those who traveled it in war or for diplomatic missions. To revisit the political, geological, and architectural history of each, Keahey’s journey stuck as close as possible to the original routes, coursing through some of most arresting landscapes, ruins, villages, and towns of modern Italy, Greece, and Turkey. The author, who has written widely about Italy, reveals engineering marvels built largely by Roman soldiers, all the more impressive because so much of the pavement created from varied local materials still survives. Instrumental in the success of both journey and book were the numerous informal guides who assisted Keahey along the way, helping him separate fact from folklore and locate the most intriguing places. His own knowledge of the interplay between the great figures of the Republic and the Empire, of ancient mythology and earlier Italian cultures, is just as vital. Readers less enamored of the subject will be slowed by the sheer weight of journalistic detail and occasional repetition, but for others, it's an admirable travelogue reflecting Keahey’s passions and an ideal step-by-step guide to anyone wanting to duplicate his excursions.
The ancient routes of Rome come alive in this appealing new history.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781250792402
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
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
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