A captivating journey with an erudite guide.
An illuminating voyage into marvelous historical sites.
Underlying Hughes’ fascinating tour of the Seven Wonders of the World, a list compiled in the second century B.C.E, are questions about the nature of wonder itself: “why we wonder, why we create, why we choose to remember the wonder of others.” Devoting a chapter to each, Hughes, author of Istanbul and Helen of Troy, describes in rich detail the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia—the only Ancient Wonder on mainland Greece—the Mausoleum of Halikarnassos in what is now southern Turkey, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Pharos Lighthouse at Alexandria. The author imagines how they would have been seen by their original makers as well as what they have meant to those who made long and sometimes arduous pilgrimages to visit them. Around 10 million each year, for example, travel to the Great Pyramid of Giza, constructed 45 centuries ago at the edge of the Libyan desert. More than “a staggeringly audacious and sophisticated act of construction,” the soaring structure of 2.3 million limestone blocks, housing internal burial chambers, is “saturated with symbolic meaning” about the nature of life and death. Of all the Seven Wonders, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon may not ever have existed, although Hughes speculates that they could have been an elevated arboretum within Babylon’s colorful inner walls, irrigated by an innovative water system. Whatever form the gardens took, Hughes asserts, they were expressions of power, both political and technological, the start of “a dangerously domineering relationship with the natural world.” Others of the wonders, too, like the looming statue of Zeus and the tomb, or mausoleum, of King Mausolos, were gargantuan representations of “individual agency and perfect power.”
A captivating journey with an erudite guide.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593686157
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
