A limpidly written, highly accessible, and comprehensive history of Greece and its civilizations from prehistory through the collapse of Alexander the Great's empire. In brisk fashion, Martin (Classics/Holy Cross Coll.) narrates the highlights of what little is known about the Stone Age in Greece, the prehistoric Minoan civilization on the island of Crete, the rise of Mycenean culture, and the Dark Age that looms as a lacuna between approximately 1200 b.c., when Mycenae mysteriously collapsed, and about 750 b.c., when Greece's Archaic Age began. In the Archaic Age, Martin relates, the foundations of life during the classical period were laid: the institution of slavery, which spurred the growth of a leisure class; the emergence of city-states; the establishment of laws; and the development of various types of polity all contributed to both the creative culture and the political tensions that characterized Greece during later eras. Although broadly discussing political, military, and social history, Martin emphasizes the cultural achievements of Athenian civilization during the Golden Age and the impact of the horrendous 27-year Peloponnesian War, which sapped the military strength of Athens and effectively finished the city as a power. Martin also traces the rise of the mercurial Alexander the Great and the rapid creation of his magnificent, far-flung, and ephemeral empire and its disintegration after Alexander's death in 323 b.c. into numerous kingdoms, culturally diverse but all with a Hellenistic flavor. This concise but wide-ranging narrative takes us up to the death of Cleopatra VII, the last Hellenistic monarch of Egypt, in 30 b.c., and the emergence of Rome as the dominant Mediterranean power. A highly readable account of ancient Greece, particularly useful as an introductory or review text for the student or the general reader.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-300-06767-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
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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