A literate rendering of Alexander’s life, drawing on the most reliable ancient and modern sources. (See also Steven...
Master of the Persian Empire at the age of 26, conqueror of Central Asia at 30, dead at 32.
Alexander’s legend endures, and with very good reason. Writes classicist/biographer Cartledge (Greek History/Chairman of Classics Faculty/Cambridge Univ.; The Spartans, 2003), he “became at various times a hero, a quasi-holy man, a Christian saint, a new Achilles, a philosopher, a scientist, and prophet, and a visionary.” But most importantly, he was a warrior. Alexander’s victories were by no means inevitable, Cartledge notes, and some came about because Alexander retained certain military innovations of his father, Philip of Macedon, who had conquered much of Greece only a few years before Alexander’s time. For instance, the men of the Macedonian army carried their own equipment and supplies, which reduced the size of the baggage train and “rendered distance a negligible factor,” allowing that army to range widely. Alexander added a great navy to this army after taking control of Philip’s forces upon his father’s death—a demise in which, Cartledge more than hints, Alexander may have played an important part: “The charge of patricide can never be proved,” he slyly writes, “but that it can be contemplated at all conveys a good notion of the edgy quality of life at the top of Macedonian society.” A devoted student of Aristotle’s, although he gave the so-called barbarians more credit than did his master, Alexander was the supreme pragmatist: here he allowed the conquered cities of Greece to keep their old democratic governments, there he butchered the satraps of Persia just as an object lesson, for Alexander “did more or less what he wanted” and understood the uses of terror. And what he wanted more than anything else, it appears, was to conquer the world, drink, and be treated like a god, all of which he accomplished before meeting his own end—perhaps, Cartledge notes, as a victim of poisoning.
A literate rendering of Alexander’s life, drawing on the most reliable ancient and modern sources. (See also Steven Pressfield’s The Virtues of War: A Novel of Alexander the Great)Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2004
ISBN: 1-58567-565-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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