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ALEXANDRIA

Name: ALEXANDRIA
Author: Theodore Vrettos
ISBN: 0-7432-0569-3

CITY OF THE WESTERN MIND

by Theodore Vrettos ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 6, 2001

Still, a fine portrait of a city long overshadowed by its Italian master.

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What Rome was to politics and war, Alexandria was to scholarship and culture—or so contends Vrettos (The Elgin Affair, 1997) in this rather disjointed history.

Founded by Alexander the Great in 332 b.c., the city was capital of Egypt and intellectual center of the Western world until the Arabs conquered the country in a.d. 641. A multicultural metropolis that would eventually harbor Christians, Jews, and pagans, with inhabitants hailing from places as far-flung as Spain and India, Alexandria continued the traditions of intellectual endeavor established in Athens. Its scholars translated the Old Testament into Greek and established Neo-Platonism as a school of philosophy. Vrettos suggests that the city owed its character to the wisdom of Alexander’s urban planning, which created a town not unlike Manhattan. Alexandria was built on an island, with its sumptuous palaces, university, and famous library forming the heart of the city. At the same time, Alexandria’s corn exchange was the largest in the ancient world, and its location at the mouth of the Nile allowed the Ptolemys, Egypt’s royal family, to regulate trade from the Far East. The city declined under Cleopatra, however. Even though she was probably the most gifted Ptolemy ever to rule, she had the misfortune to govern when Rome was racked by civil wars. She hitched her star first to Caesar, bearing his son, then after his assassination allied herself with Marc Antony, an incompetent drunk who could not bring his many schemes to fruition. Eventually, the Romans, under Octavian, took over the city. Vrettos enjoys delving into the stories behind Alexandria’s many faces, dividing his five chapters into headings like “The Mind of the City” and “The Soul of the City.” Taken separately, each is an accomplished monograph. Together, however, they fail to cohere. The reader often loses sight of the big picture the author is trying to convey.

Still, a fine portrait of a city long overshadowed by its Italian master.

Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2001

ISBN: 0-7432-0569-3

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Free Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2001

Categories:

HISTORY | ANCIENT | GENERAL HISTORY

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Awards & Accolades

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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Awards & Accolades

Likes

150

Our Verdict

GET IT

Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2017

New York Times Bestseller

IndieBound Bestseller

National Book Award Finalist

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

Categories:

GENERAL HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | UNITED STATES | FIRST/NATIVE NATIONS | HISTORY

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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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.