A vivid account of five Roman emperors, emphasizing their vices and vicious behavior with less attention to the vast empire,...
A decade after his award-winning life of Julius Caesar (Rubicon, 2004), veteran historian Holland (In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire, 2012, etc.) delivers biographies of five descendants who ruled after his death.
This is well-trod ground for good reason: this period saw the foundation of the Roman Empire, whose emperors, after a prosperous start, revealed a distressing if entertaining tendency to self-indulgence, paranoia, and murder. Following Caesar’s assassination in 44 B.C.E., his adopted son, Octavius, won a brutal civil war to assume power. Octavius restored the facade of the old republic while a compliant Senate granted him vast authority. As Augustus, he ruled efficiently and was widely mourned upon his death in 14 C.E., having expanded the empire and begun the 200-year “pax Romana.” Several promising successors died during his long reign, and Rome was left with the sullen, reclusive Tiberius, who retired to Capri after a few years, leaving ruling to underlings and living a life of (according to later chroniclers) debauchery. The short, stormy reign of Caligula ended with him as the first emperor murdered by the Praetorian Guard, who crowned his successor, Claudius. Modern scholars have a fairly high opinion of Claudius and even of his adopted son, Nero, although the dynasty ended with widespread revolt and his suicide in 68 C.E. Holland makes liberal use of unreliable but lurid Roman sources, including Tacitus, Suetonius, Dio, and others, but he has done his homework and acknowledges modern scholars who take these with a grain of salt. The author also includes a timeline, a dramatis personae, and a family tree for the Julians and Claudians.
A vivid account of five Roman emperors, emphasizing their vices and vicious behavior with less attention to the vast empire, which continued to prosper despite them.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53784-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
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 Yorker staff 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
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
