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The shadow king

March 24, 2015

History, they say – whoever “they” are – is written by the victors.

Well, not exactly. Our age of revisionism and conspiracy theories, coupled with the unending vacuum that is the Internet, encourages us to consider just how victorious – or at least good – the victors really were and, thus, just how wronged the losers might’ve been.

That’s the backdrop of Pierre Briant’s “Darius in the Shadow of Alexander” (Harvard University Press, 579 pages, $39.95), newly translated by Jane Marie Todd and published in the United States after first appearing in French 12 years ago. In this book, Briant – emeritus professor of the Achaemenid world and Alexander’s empire at the Collège de France in Paris – explores how and why Darius III, who lost an empire to Alexander the Great, came to “haunt the realm of historical oblivion.” It is not, for obvious reasons, a biography. But it is a fascinating, extensively researched study of how branding can be as important as any battle.

Briant’s book arrives at a time when Persia (modern-day Iran) is very much in the news due to the controversial yet productive nuclear disarmament talks and Iran’s role in fighting ISIS – which some see as a play for greater power in the Middle East. Meanwhile, Israel’s recent discovery of coins bearing the likeness of Alexander go a long way to explaining why the Greeks – who knew how to spin – won and the Persians lost.

But first a bit of background: Some 130 years before the birth of Alexander in neighboring Macedon in July of 356 B.C., the Persians invaded Greece and burnt the Acropolis atop Athens, destroying its temples and worshipers. It was Greece’s 9/11 moment.

Alexander’s father – Philip II, king of powerful, rough-hewn Macedon and hegemon, or protector, of the more refined, resentful Greek city-states – seized upon Persian atrocity in his plans to invade Persia, liberating Greek nationals along its Mediterranean coast. But Philip – who loved much but none-too-well – was assassinated by a former male lover undoubtedly at the instigation of his ex-wife (and Alexander’s mother), Olympias. At 20, Alexander found himself heir not only to Macedon and the hegemony of the Greek city-states but to his mother’s dynastic ambitions and his father’s Persian dreams. ...

Anne Boleyn and the games men play

March 16, 2015

One of the nuggets I gleaned from attending the Algonkian Writers’ Conference last December in Manhattan was that when it comes to historical romance, it’s the Tudors or bust.

It figures. Working backward, there was Elizabeth I, England’s greatest ruler; her sister, the pathetic, misguided “Bloody Mary”; their baby bro, Edward VI; and, of course, the daddy from Hell, Henry VIII, with those – count ’em – six wives. No dramatist could conjure such symmetrical marital disaster – Catherine of Aragon, annulled; Anne Boleyn, beheaded; Jane Seymour, dead in childbirth; Anne of Cleves, annulled; Katherine Howard, beheaded; and Catherine Parr, survived Henry, but wait, would remarry and, you guessed it, wind up dead in childbirth.

Historian David Starkey (“Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII”) once told me that of the half-dozen, Catherine of Aragon was the only one Henry ever really loved. But his quest for a son, for proof of his manhood and for liberation from papal Rome and the memory of his older brother, Arthur, who had been Catherine’s husband, drove him into the arms of the bewitching Anne Boleyn, linchpin of the six wives’ psychodrama. Did he use Anne to gain control of the Church in England or was he, as Starkey said, so in love with her that he was willing to renounce his role as Defender of the (Roman Catholic) Faith? Perhaps a bit of both?

Anne’s rise and fall is told through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell – the blacksmith’s son-turned-chancellor – in Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning novels “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies.” (She’s at work on the last book in the trilogy.) Naturally, PBS’ “Masterpiece” couldn’t resist. “Wolf Hall” (April 5 through May 10) dramatizes the first two books, with British theater star Mark Rylance as Cromwell, Damian Lewis (“Homeland”) as Henry and Claire Foy (“Little Dorrit”) as Anne. “Wolf Hall” – the title refers to rival Jane Seymour’s familial estate but suggests the den of wolves the Tudors were – is a daring conceit. For what makes men like Cromwell effective, their ability to manipulate and maneuver behind the scenes, is what can make them potentially boring front and center. (Imagine the story of Bill and Hillary Clinton told from the viewpoint of their accountant.) The beauty of the books and the miniseries is that we enter Cromwell’s mind to meet a man weary of and disgusted by the power games men play but unable to relinquish them. ...

A-Rod, Ray Rice and the game of ‘Who’s Sorry Now?’

February 18, 2015

Cue Connie Francis. In this “the winter of our discontent” – the season of 90-inch snowfalls, Southern ice, broken water pipes and equally shattered hearts – the lament of the woman with the catch in her voice and a torch-song life to match would seem most appropriate.

Really, it’s as if we’re all stuck in “Dr. Zhivago” – without Omar Sharif.

In this “region of ice” – thank you, Joyce Carol Oates – everyone is sorry. Ray Rice is sorry for cold-cocking his then wife-to-be, Janay Palmer, issuing an apology almost a year to the date of his Valentine’s Day (image) Massacre. (Could the holiday of hearts have been the inspiration?)

Hot on Ra-Ri’s Achilles heels comes A-Rod and his handwritten apology for steroid abuse and – the thing that always does you in more than the transgression itself – lying about it.

And speaking of lying, opprobrium and ridicule continue to snow down on disgraced anchorman Brian Williams for aggrandizing his role in the Iraq War – although Jerry Seinfeld’s line on the SNL 40th anniversary show about Williams being part of the original “Saturday Night Live” cast was one of the subtler digs. The irony is that the talk show-minded Williams probably counted as friends many of the people now making fun at his expense. Ouch.

Let’s just say Williams should be glad that he’s not A-Rod. The disdain heaped on him by The New York Times’ columnist Tyler Kepner is typical of the way in which the once and apparently future New York Yankee is now viewed. There are two schools of thought on this. One says that justice is justice and compassion, like patience, has its limits, particularly as said limited patience is often accompanied by the sneaking suspicion that the contrite are not all that contrite but actually seeking something less noble than the epic redemption found in Joseph Conrad’s “Lord Jim,” say like a return to the Yanks or the NFL. (It reminds you of the moment in “Gone With the Wind” in which Rhett Butler tells Scarlett O’Hara that she’s like the thief who isn’t sorry for what he’s done but is awfully sorry he got caught.) ...

The QB: alone at the top of the world

January 30, 2015

Much of the hoopla surrounding Super Duper Bowl weekend revolves around the two opposing quarterbacks – one of whom, the New England Patriots’ Tom Brady, is trying to perpetuate a dynasty; the other of whom, the Seattle Seahawks’ Russell Wilson, is trying to start one.

Both are featured in the superb new coffee-table book, “Sports Illustrated NFL QB: The Greatest Position in Sports” ($29.95), a tome you’ll want to tackle again and again. It’s one I particularly love poring over as I prepare my novel about a gay, biracial quarterback’s quest for acceptance in the NFL, “The Penalty for Holding.”

“NFL QB” takes you down to the field and past the locker room into the mind, body, heart and soul of the quarterback, who more than any other player on the world stage represents the quintessence of masculinity. Walter Iooss Jr.’s double-page photograph of New York Jet Joe Namath – shirtless and hirsute, casting an appreciative leer at two ladies of a certain vintage as he sits on the beach surrounded by equally admiring males – says everything you need to know about the QB: He’s the big man on the campus of life.

But being special cuts both way, and both Tim Layden’s introduction and former Cincinnati Bengals’ QB Boomer Esiason’s foreword do much to capture the aloneness, pain and vomit-inducing terror of a job on which cities as well as teams rise and fall.

As in Sports Illustrated itself – from which most of the words and images were taken – the words and images here serve as a counterpoint as they chart the course from the blocker of the single-wing formation to the QB taking the snap from center in the T formation; from the pocket passer (Brady, Peyton Manning) to the running QB (Wilson, Colin Kaepernick, Cam Newton, Robert Griffin III); and, perhaps most important of all, from sideshow to icon.

While “NFL QB” captures the glamour – what a babe Peyton Manning was on the September 1997 cover of Esquire – what lingers is the grit (brother Eli bloodied yet unbowed in a local showdown between the New York Giants and Jets in 2010). ...

Alexander the Great’s world (still)

November 29, 2014

My family, friends and colleagues often tease me about my fascination for Alexander the Great. I get it. Who cares about someone – a single-minded Greco-Macedonian conqueror, no less – who lived some 300 years before Jesus?

But you see, the fact that we call Jesus Christ “Jesus Christ:” – and not Joshua bar Joseph, his historical Hebrew name – is because of Alexander and the spread of Hellenistic culture. Before Alexander, culture flowed east to west. After his conquest of the Persian Empire (331 B.C.), it would tend west to east. And the resulting tension between the two has reverberated down through the ages, particularly in the Middle East, the heart of his empire.

Our soldiers have been following in his footfall since the start of the Iraq War in 2003, as I wrote then for the Gannett newspapers. We’re still living in Alexander’s world. We just don’t know it.

The new black (Hint: It isn’t orange)

November 2, 2014

I owe the inspiration for this post to my friend and WAG magazine colleague Ronni Diamondstein, a writer with superb taste in literature, as befits a former librarian.

Ronni, who has lived in and written about The Netherlands, recommended Jessie Burton’s new novel “The Miniaturist” (Ecco/Harper Collins, $26.99, 400 pages) – a book that I devoured one evening and that has made me despair of being a novelist as it is such a marvelous evocation of Holland in the 17th century. (Think Tracy Chevalier’s “Girl With a Pearl Earring,” only darker.) You can almost smell the tang of the water rising from the canals and the sea.

“The Miniaturist” is about a country girl with an old family name but little money who arrives in Amsterdam...

The return of Lestat

October 29, 2014

With Halloween-y coming up on Friday, I thought it a good moment to touch on the new Anne Rice, which brings her back to her greatest creation, the Vampire Lestat.

Or at least to his world. He seems to be the absent sun around which the other characters revolve in “Prince Lestat” (Knopf, $28.95, 451 pages). But then he often is in the later “Vampire Chronicles” novels.

It’s easy to make fun of Rice’s purple prose and bizarr-o plotting. Reviewing the book in The New York Times, Terrence Rafferty writes:

Lestat’s vampirism dates from the late 18th century, but his star quality seems very much the product of the time in which Rice gave birth to him, the 1970s: “Interview With the Vampire” reads like a People magazine profile written by Ann Radcliffe. (People had begun publication just a couple of years earlier.) Although the style, mixing celebrity-worshiping gush with Gothic portentousness, is, not to put too fine a point on it, nutty, Rice wielded it with amazing self-assurance, as if it were inevitable, something that had been waiting to be discovered. That’s what all pop-culture geniuses do, in their different ways. And over nearly four decades and many, many books, she has seen no reason to change it. In “Prince Lestat,” the first Vampire Chronicles novel in a decade, Rice’s queenly prose is unaltered. Time cannot wither nor custom stale its infinite monotony.

But back in the 1970s when the gay rights movement was young and AIDS was lurking in the wings, Rice’s homoerotic bloodsuckers tapped into the zeitgeist – something that Rafferty himself alludes to. It’s what all great pop novelists do, be they John Grisham or J.K. Rowling. ...