A highly readable, vigorous repudiation of the Western-centric school of history.
A classical archaeologist examines the “grand narrative” of Western civilization and finds it wanting.
The Enlightenment may have had its good points, but as prizewinning British scholar Mac Sweeney notes, it was thoroughly racialized in its mania for classification, leaving little room in the rise of the West for “someone like me (female, mixed-race) [who] did not belong in a tradition personified by…elite white men.” The author argues convincingly that it was a departure from Greek and Roman senses of who they were and how they fit into the world. A modern portrait gallery of the products of those traditions would be the White European males whose images Mac Sweeney found enshrined in the Library of Congress, but the Greeks took it as a given that “a big part of being Greek was about doing Greek things in a Greek sort of way,” which did not involve being White, Black, or any other skin color so much as speaking and thinking Greek. As Mac Sweeney adds, Herodotus looked more to the East than to whatever might have qualified as the West in his day, when the second tradition, the Roman, was beginning to rise—and which was also not racialized nor particularly ethnocentric, its influences stretching to and from as far away as South Asia. Indeed, writes the author, despite the bleatings of latter-day Italian racists, the Romans, counterintuitively, “saw themselves as the descendants of refugees,” namely the Asian survivors of the siege of Troy. The clash-of-civilizations narrative—in part driven by a misreading of Herodotus, Mac Sweeney points out—is based on incorrect and harmful presumptions. Mac Sweeney paints on a broad canvas and introduces numerous little-known characters, from the Roman aristocrat Livilla to the African ruler Njinga of Angola. She builds on arguments by Edward Said and other contemporary critics of Western triumphalism, and she also examines the counternarratives offered by the likes of the Islamic State and China, which have their own intellectual problems.
A highly readable, vigorous repudiation of the Western-centric school of history.Pub Date: May 23, 2023
ISBN: 9780593472170
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
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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