Morgenthau at the University of Chicago where he earned both an M.A. and a Ph. D. in political science. He received his J.D. degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Buffa was a criminal defense attorney for 10 years and his seven Joseph Antonelli novels strive to reflect, from his own experience, what a courtroom lawyer does, the way he (or she) thinks, and the way he feels about what he does.
In Buffa's new novel, Immunity, the President of the United States has ordered the murder of his political opponents—and the Constitution seems powerless to stop him.
Buffa's latest take in his "Third Reading" series covers Tacitus and the dangers of history. It begins:
When Thucydides wrote his history of the Peloponnesian War, he insisted it was a “possession for all time.” This did not mean simply that it was a book that would always be available to anyone who might have an interest in what happened in the war between the Spartans and the Athenians. It meant that future generations would be able to learn what always happens in political life, that what happened in his time and place is the very essence of what happens in every time and place. Thucydides was what was once called a political historian. As one of his most perceptive readers explained, a political historian “must be more than a citizen or even a statesman: he must be a wise man.” Thucydides, a wise man, wrote about what happenedVisit D.W. Buffa's website.when Athens became an empire. Cornelius Tacitus, another wise man, wrote about what happened when the Roman republic became the Roman empire; when the ambition for power lost all restraint, when the power to dominate everyone and everything became the only power worth having.
Born in the middle of the first century A.D., Tacitus witnessed the reign of terror during the last three years of the emperor Domitian, and the judicial murders of many of Rome’s best citizens. He learned early the virtues of discretion, and when he decided to write history chose his subjects with care, and was even more careful in the way he wrote. His two principal histories, The Annals and The Histories, were probably written together in A.D.115 or 116, when he was in his early sixties, The Annals provides a history of the Roman emperors of the Julian line from Tiberius to Nero, during the years A.D.14-68. The Histories continues the story, but only for the year, A.D.69, a year in which, incredible as it may sound, there were three civil wars and four murdered emperors. Tacitus writes nothing about Julius Caesar, and nothing about the half century in which Augustus completed the destruction of the republic and made Rome, for all intents and purposes, a monarchy. Tacitus is a great historian, and a great writer, a writer, who understood that the truth, to be written, has often to be disguised.
With a marvelous capacity for misdirection, Tacitus gives the reason, or hints at the reason, why...[read on]
Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky; Tocqueville’s America and Ours; American Statesmen; Ancient and Modern Writers Reconsidered; Père Goriot; The Remarkable Edmund Burke; The Novels of W.H. Hudson; America Revised; The City And Man; "The Use And Abuse Of History"; I, Claudius; The Closing of The American Mind; History of Rome; Before The Deluge; Herodotus's Histories; The Education of Henry Adams; Duff Cooper’s Talleyrand; The Golden Bowl; The Life of George Washington; Tacitus and the dangers of history.
--Marshal Zeringue
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