A highly readable, vigorous repudiation of the Western-centric school of history.
A classical archaeologist examines the “grand narrative” of Western civilization and finds it wanting.
The Enlightenment may have had its good points, but as prizewinning British scholar Mac Sweeney notes, it was thoroughly racialized in its mania for classification, leaving little room in the rise of the West for “someone like me (female, mixed-race) [who] did not belong in a tradition personified by…elite white men.” The author argues convincingly that it was a departure from Greek and Roman senses of who they were and how they fit into the world. A modern portrait gallery of the products of those traditions would be the White European males whose images Mac Sweeney found enshrined in the Library of Congress, but the Greeks took it as a given that “a big part of being Greek was about doing Greek things in a Greek sort of way,” which did not involve being White, Black, or any other skin color so much as speaking and thinking Greek. As Mac Sweeney adds, Herodotus looked more to the East than to whatever might have qualified as the West in his day, when the second tradition, the Roman, was beginning to rise—and which was also not racialized nor particularly ethnocentric, its influences stretching to and from as far away as South Asia. Indeed, writes the author, despite the bleatings of latter-day Italian racists, the Romans, counterintuitively, “saw themselves as the descendants of refugees,” namely the Asian survivors of the siege of Troy. The clash-of-civilizations narrative—in part driven by a misreading of Herodotus, Mac Sweeney points out—is based on incorrect and harmful presumptions. Mac Sweeney paints on a broad canvas and introduces numerous little-known characters, from the Roman aristocrat Livilla to the African ruler Njinga of Angola. She builds on arguments by Edward Said and other contemporary critics of Western triumphalism, and she also examines the counternarratives offered by the likes of the Islamic State and China, which have their own intellectual problems.
A highly readable, vigorous repudiation of the Western-centric school of history.Pub Date: May 23, 2023
ISBN: 9780593472170
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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