A fine example of ancient history made vivid for modern readers.
A well-crafted tale of ugly little battles in faraway places, as newsworthy and compelling today as it was in 400 B.C.
During the Cold War, the journalist Walter Karp recounted, American military officers read Thucydides on the 30-year-old Peloponnesian War and role-played the war in the modern age, the U.S. being democratic Athens, the USSR being authoritarian Sparta. To read between the lines here, conservative classicist Hanson (Ripples of Battle, 2003, etc.) agrees in likening Athens to the modern U.S., but otherwise casts the war as a civil conflict among “Greek speakers who worshipped the same gods and farmed and fought in the same manner.” Athenian democracy was, of course, democracy for the few, and it may be stretching reality to call the long conflict “the first great instance where Western powers turned on each other,” inasmuch as Lysander and Alcibiades and company likely did not think in any such terms. Still, the possibilities of anachronism are endless, for it’s possible to read the adventure in Iraq into nearly every page (as when Hanson remarks, lyrically, that the endless war “calls for acceptance that thousands will end up rotten in little-known places”) and to see current political figures recapitulating such mistakes as Pericles’ notion that a war of attrition would convince the foe to yield. Few modern scholars have addressed that war beyond a few big battles and the plague that devastated Athens after Pericles turned “the most majestic city of the Greek world into one enormous and squalid refugee camp”; Hanson instead writes of two Peloponnesian Wars, the one of huge clashes at places like Mantinea and Delium and the small one fought “in the shadows.” Big or small, the war drained the lifeblood of two great city-states and effectively ended Greek suzerainty over the ancient Mediterranean.
A fine example of ancient history made vivid for modern readers.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-6095-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
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
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
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