Alexander & Caesar

Why we love it

• •A boy quiets a wild horse that has thrown every grown man who tried to ride it, because he alone notices the animal is terrified of its own shadow.
• •Kidnapped by pirates, the other boy refuses to be frightened: he laughs at them, tells them their ransom is insultingly low, and promises he will come back and crucify them. He did.
• •The two lives actually touch. Caesar, grown up, reads about Alexander and bursts into tears, because Alexander had conquered the known world by the age Caesar had reached with nothing to show. One measured himself against the other.
• •Two men who conquered more of the world than almost anyone before or since, and the most dangerous word in either story turns out to be a small one: enough.

Why it matters

Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar are the two most famous conquerors who ever lived, the men later generals and kings and dictators all measured themselves against. Before he was thirty Alexander had built the largest empire the world had yet seen, and he died at thirty-two, still hungry for more. Caesar conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon, ended the Roman Republic, and was stabbed to death by his own friends at a meeting of the Senate. Two thousand years later we still reach for their names whenever we mean ambition without limit. What makes the pair worth a child's time is the question their two lives raise together: both men wanted to be the greatest, neither ever felt he had enough, and that same hunger built wonders and then destroyed them. The books let a child thrill to the conquests first and then, when they are older, sit with the harder thing, that the drive that makes someone great can be the very thing that ruins them.