“I long for and seek after,” one fragment reads, serving well as an epigraph for this evocative book about a mysterious...
From fragmentary sources, a classicist reconstructs the life and times of the poet Plato called the 10th Muse.
Biographical facts about Sappho “are few and often subject to dispute,” acknowledges Freeman (Classics/Luther Coll.; Oh My Gods: A Modern Retelling of Greek Myths, 2012, etc.), and of nine scrolls of her poetry once housed in the ancient Library of Alexandria, only a few poems remain, some represented by a single word. Since a biography is impossible, the author looks to literary, artistic, and archaeological sources to investigate women’s experiences on the island of Lesbos in the late seventh to early sixth centuries B.C.E. The result is an authoritative, insightful narrative that looks at childhood, marriage, motherhood, sexuality, religion, and death to speculate about the realities of Sappho’s life. Freeman is certain that Sappho was married, “since the single life was simply not a viable option, especially for a woman” and since weddings emerged as a theme in her poetry. She was a mother, with a beloved daughter, Cleis, with whom she apparently lived in her old age. Beyond these deductions, Freeman offers surprising details about marriage customs (brides, for example, were usually at least 15 years younger than husbands), beliefs about conception and pregnancy (“women were simply incubators for men,” contributing nothing to conception), and women’s religious practices. Among hundreds of deities, the goddess Demeter was singled out for women’s worship, a practice, the author remarks, that “naturally aroused the discomfort of men accustomed to keeping women in their place.” Sexuality was a fluid concept in ancient Greece, with no word for “homosexual,” and male same-sex relationships were tolerated more than lesbian relationships. From her descriptions of erotic love, Freeman concludes that Sappho preferred women. Appended to the biography are the author’s translations of nearly 200 pieces.
“I long for and seek after,” one fragment reads, serving well as an epigraph for this evocative book about a mysterious ancient literary figure.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-393-24223-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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