(p. C12) After another year that has cried out for inspiring leadership, I grasped glimmers of optimism from Matt Waters’s “King of the World,” a biography of Persian king Cyrus the Great.
. . .
Today Cyrus is revered as a model of pragmatic, benevolent rulership.
. . .
. . . Cyrus imposed or forbade no religion, language, ethnicity, dress code or culture on his native Persians or the many other peoples he ruled. Would that this were the case for his descendants today.
For the full review, see:
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date December 8, 2022, and has the title “Who Read What in 2022: Thinkers and Tastemakers.”)
The book praised by Timothy Potts is:
Waters, Matt. King of the World: The Life of Cyrus the Great. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.