For scholars of ancient history.
An academic study centered on the events of 49 B.C.E., when Julius Caesar marched his army into Rome and destroyed the republic.
Fezzi (Roman History/Univ. of Padua) begins with more than most readers want to know about Roman governmental structure. Although a republic (a nation without a king), it barely qualified as a democracy. Every citizen could vote, but in its complex, corrupt electoral system, only the very wealthy could win high-level positions, which were unpaid. Being a victorious general has been a vote-getter throughout history, and Caesar took full advantage. By the first century B.C.E., murderous generals dominated the republic, which was on its last legs. Fezzi examines the period after 60 B.C.E., an era that featured three strong men: Caesar, then engaged in conquering Gaul; Pompey, an older general already famous for his victories; and the fabulously wealthy Crassus. They cooperated only as far as it served their interests. Fezzi’s favorite source, Cicero, was a senator and lawyer who sometimes opposed Caesar. As a lawyer, he often prosecuted or defended and then wrote about it. Trials in ancient Rome were often open-air spectacles where crowds occasionally rioted and killed participants. Aiming to leave no stone unturned, the author recounts so many of Cicero’s legal actions that readers may lose track and likely interest. Matters came to a head in 49 B.C.E., with Crassus dead and Pompey and the Senate scheming against Caesar, still occupied in Gaul. Ordered to return, he was obligated to come alone because no general could bring his army into Italy—at that time bounded on the north by the river Rubicon. Apparently fearing for his life, he brought his army, beginning a vicious civil war that ended with his victory and, a year later, assassination. General readers take note: This is a dense, bookish history; Tom Holland’s Rubicon delivers a far more lucid but still intelligent account of this period.
For scholars of ancient history.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-24145-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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
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