A sometimes-delightful Roman miscellany.
Bookshelves groan under the weight of accounts of Roman emperors, but when Beard decides to add another, readers should perk up.
Ancient history specialist Beard, author of SPQR, Twelve Caesars, and other acclaimed books, ably conveys the difficulty of examining thousands of papyri as well as stone and bronze inscriptions dug out by archaeologists, many still unread. She emphasizes the empire’s crippling weakness that was never corrected: succession. Later, European thrones passed to the eldest child, which assured stability if not competence, but this was never the Roman system. Rarely did a son follow his father; more often, an emperor legally adopted a designated successor. When this happened, leadership tended to pass smoothly, but many admired emperors owed their position to assassination, civil war, mass murder, and assorted skullduggery. Beard maintains that this answers an age-old puzzle: why Roman emperors are pronounced either “good” or “bad.” In reality, emperors succeeded by their chosen candidate ended up with a broadly favorable reputation; no one dared offend the current ruler. Having covered the big picture in SPQR and not wanting to repeat herself, Beard focuses on the details of how emperors lived, governed, traveled, dined, and amused themselves, and the result is a mixed bag. Chapters on imperial dining rooms and imperial palaces reveal the impressive skill of archaeologists in resurrecting crumbling ruins, but they also contain more architectural minutiae than casual readers will want. An emperor’s face appears on thousands of surviving sculptures and millions of coins and bric-a-brac, but few readers will be surprised to learn that none are accurate portraits. Beard is deft in her exploration of imperial bureaucracy, showing how it dealt with an avalanche of paperwork from distant officials, cities, military leaders, and individuals in an era with no postal service. Emperors’ deaths, natural or otherwise, led to fascinating consequences.
A sometimes-delightful Roman miscellany.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9780871404220
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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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