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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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