A welcome popularization of ancient history, with a nicely vengeful cliffhanger of an ending that begs for a sequel.
Why do they hate us? That’s what Herodotus wanted to know, and this lively history of the Persian Wars ventures a few answers.
Indeed, writes historian/novelist Holland (Rubicon, 2004, etc.), if history begins with Herodotus, then that question is the foundation of history. “Why, he wondered, did the peoples of East and West find it so hard to live in peace?” Herodotus thought it might have had something to do with the business of kidnapping princesses, or the savage attacking of Troy. Holland takes a longer view, writing of restless tribes of Central Asians and their push-pull migrations, of power-hungry satraps, of great emperors. The first was Cyrus, who dominated all of southwestern Asia. His lieutenant Harpagus seems to have had it in for the Greeks who lived along the coast of what is now western Turkey: “City by city,” Holland writes, “he brutally subdued them all,” except the lucky ones who fled to Greece and farther westward to Italy and Sicily. The Persians seem to have taken a liking to the things of Greece, and they pushed ever westward, led by the great general Xerxes. Cyrus knew of the Greeks; a delegation from the mainland once came to his palace and told him bluntly that they had better leave them alone, or “he would have to answer to those who sent them—the Spartans.” The Greeks apparently thought that mention of the Spartans was enough, but Cyrus and company were undeterred—and, to their sorrow, they learned their lesson in battles at places like Marathon, Salamis and Thermopylae. Holland’s descriptions of these epochal battles are suitably stirring, and if his East-versus-West notion is just a touch anachronistic, it points to all the misunderstandings, ambition and ignorance that have characterized that struggle ever since.
A welcome popularization of ancient history, with a nicely vengeful cliffhanger of an ending that begs for a sequel.Pub Date: May 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-385-51311-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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