A deep immersion in a bloody era of ancient Rome, perfect for readers of Mary Beard and Tom Holland.
Most readers’ knowledge of the assassination in 44 B.C.E. ends with the bloody deed, but Stothard brings its aftermath to pulsing life. The last assassin of the title is Cassius Parmensis, the last of Caesar’s killers to suffer the vengeance of Octavian, Caesar’s great-nephew and successor. The author chronicles the development of the assassination plot, forged by men opposed to Caesar’s grab for absolute power, then his murder and the ensuing brutal civil war. Several characters, notably assassins Marcus Brutus and Gaius Cassius, have been memorialized by Shakespeare and may be familiar to readers, as will the orator Cicero, Octavian’s occasional ally Mark Antony, and Cleopatra. But other assassins get their moments as well: their lives, philosophies, and harrowing deaths, some on the battlefields of civil war, some by suicide, some slaughtered by Octavian’s henchmen. Stothard, former editor of the Times Literary Supplement, excels in bringing the ancient past to life. Here he is on the Roman festival of Lupercalia: “The men wore mud and goatskin loin cloths. The women bared their legs for the whips of the runners….It was a festival of breathlessness and nightmare, sex and myth, demons kept at bay by winter flowers.” The author vividly shows Octavian destroyed communities thought to be friendly to the assassins’ cause, seizing their valuable land and reapportioning it to his soldiers, slaughtering many, and sending others away as permanent refugees. One of Stothard’s accomplishments is to sustain the suspense of the hunt, even though readers know the outcome. Those assassins who could flee dispersed to the furthest reaches of the Roman world, but Octavian, “judge, jury and relentless pursuer,” ensured that they all died. Stothard writes as if he lives and breathes the air of this tumultuous time. His readers will feel, for a brief time, that they are there as well.
A deep immersion in a bloody era of ancient Rome, perfect for readers of Mary Beard and Tom Holland.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-19-752335-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 Yorkerstaff 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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