Roman history enthusiasts will find new material to digest and general readers, useful context for the Roman way of life.
An authoritative new history unearths the true story of a slave’s son who rose through the ranks to become the Roman Empire’s most powerful man.
Publius Helvius Pertinax (126-193 C.E.) was a military officer and civil servant who packed several lifetimes into his 66 years. Though he only served 86 days before he was assassinated, military historian and archaeologist Elliott takes the basic elements of his story to fashion a mostly readable account of his life. After years as a teacher, Pertinax switched careers at age 35 and entered the military, embarking on a “dizzying upward trajectory” capped by his short-lived reign as emperor. He occupied posts in Rome’s sophisticated military and governing machines in empire hot spots like Syria, Carthage, and Britannia, “the wild west of the Roman Empire,” where he served as governor and survived an assassination attempt by mutinous legionnaires. He endured periods of banishment but always came back to move further up the ladder of rank, prestige, and wealth. After the “deluded” Emperor Commodus was assassinated, Pertinax was drafted by the Senate to become the new emperor. But he ran afoul of the Praetorian Guard, a state-sanctioned band of mercenaries ready to sell the empire's throne to the highest bidder. Pertinax’s story shows how an ordinary Roman citizen—even the son of a slave—could negotiate a rigid class and caste system. Elliott, author of several books about Roman affairs, has a deep understanding of Roman life, especially as it was lived in Britannia. His challenge is that there is very little personal information in accounts of Pertinax’s life, and he fills the gaps with more particulars about military life than are likely to interest general readers. The author vividly documents Pertinax’s last days and effectively captures the tenor of the era, a time awash in corruption and violence.
Roman history enthusiasts will find new material to digest and general readers, useful context for the Roman way of life.Pub Date: Dec. 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-78438-525-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Greenhill Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
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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