A readable and approachable history, but without much scholarly backing to support its theses.
The downfall of the Roman Empire coincides with the westward march of Attila the Hun in Holmes’ work of history, one in a series.
In this third volume of the author’s history of the end of the Roman Empire, Holmes focuses on the Eastern and Western Roman Empires in the 4th and 5th centuries. The book opens with an account of the conflict between the Roman Empire and the encroaching Huns: The author depicts a rich, vivid battle scene, imagining a history told from the perspectives of the soldiers and the people on the ground, offering a vista of Romans, Franks, and Visigoths facing off, together, against the eastern nomads. (“Long dragon pennants streaming in the wind. The sun glittering off their chain-mail. Sharp spears bristling. An unstoppable phalanx of horsemen rides down the hillside.”) Holmes’ remit broadens to track the movement of peoples across Europe as the Huns advanced. The author argues that, while the Huns didn’t directly topple the Roman Empire, they were an important factor in pushing the Goths west, and south, which led, inevitably, to the fall of Rome. He also uses paleoclimatology to make an additional argument: Desire for conquest didn’t fuel the Huns’ westward path exclusively—climate change drove them out of the Central Asian steppes. Looking at tree rings, Holmes identifies evidence of massive droughts that, he asserts, led the Huns west into Europe, crossing the Rhine in 451 and entering Gaul at the western frontier. Conveyed with clarity and accessibility, this history is a great primer for anyone interested in the migratory patterns of early Europeans, but Holmes rarely gives the reader a sense of the consequences for the people who lived in Rome, or Gaul, or North Africa. The author clearly has a talent for storytelling, but what he presents in this account is mostly a sequence of military successes and failures, with little apparent desire to immerse the reader in the proceedings.
A readable and approachable history, but without much scholarly backing to support its theses.Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2024
ISBN: 9781739786540
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Puttenham Press Ltd
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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