Aficionados of early medieval history—and of course Ravenna itself—will learn much from Herrin’s work.
The early life and times of an Italian city that sometimes threatened to overshadow Rome.
Ravenna, on the Adriatic coast near Venice and Bologna, served as an outpost in the days of the Roman Republic. When Visigoths and other outlanders descended on Rome, Ravenna seemed a promising stronghold, “partly because it was considered impregnable and partly because of its large port,” as emerita professor of classics Herrin writes. After the fall of Rome, it steadily gained importance, first as a center of Gothic power and then as a tributary city of Byzantium and an entrepôt with strong ties to the Eastern Roman empire. “This strength,” Herrin observes, “was rooted in its threefold combination of Roman law and military prowess, Greek education and culture and Christian belief and morality.” She examines each of these pillars in turn. Roman power steadily declined over the centuries until Alaric stormed the gates in 410 C.E., but Ravenna remembered the lessons of its rule, eventually establishing colonies of its own in many parts of the former empire, especially in Sicily. More powerful than any other institution was the church, so strong that rivalries with the papal headquarters in Rome were not uncommon. Of particular interest to students of early Christian history is Ravenna’s emergence as a node of Arian worship—though, Herrin writes, eventually that “heresy” would be suppressed at the order of Byzantine Emperor Justin, “a symptom of the much greater intolerance that would later result in outright persecution of minorities.” The bonds with the Eastern Roman Empire would eventually break, but the centuries of affiliation explain why even today so many people travel to Ravenna to see Byzantine art, so widely destroyed elsewhere. Even in later medieval times, adds the author, “the mosaicked churches of Ravenna…continued to inspire transalpine visitors as they became monastic centres, ensuring their preservation while all around the palaces of secular power crumbled.”
Aficionados of early medieval history—and of course Ravenna itself—will learn much from Herrin’s work.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-691-15343-8
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
HISTORY | ANCIENT | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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