A well-informed examination of ongoing efforts to understand the past.
Revealing the enduring mysteries surrounding thousands of terra-cotta warriors.
In 1974, after an ancient terra-cotta army was unearthed in northwest China, archaeologists embarked on increasingly sophisticated excavations, uncovering a huge mausoleum built for Qin Shihuang (259-210 B.C.E.), known as China’s first emperor. Its existence, recognized since his death 2,200 years ago, has generated many “legends and rumors” still not resolved even by technologically advanced archaeological research. Offering an up-to-date overview of archaeological findings, Burman (China and Iran: Parallel History, Future Threat? 2009, etc.), the only foreign trustee of the Xi’an City Wall Heritage Foundation, relates the historical context for the construction of the mausoleum and investigates questions about the emperor’s personality, rule, and legacy; prevailing assumptions about the afterlife and efforts at attaining immortality (including burial in a shroud of jade, a material with purported magical powers); and the much-debated role of the warriors. The sprawling mausoleum, writes the author, “was conceived on a scale more massive than any other monument at that stage of human history.” Although archaeologists have identified three main precincts—the pit containing the warriors, the burial chamber and other rooms inside the inner wall, and the surrounding area beyond the wall—much of the structure, lying beneath villages, factories, and roads, remains unknown. The burial site, Burman asserts, “was first and foremost to be conceived as a home,” which for the emperor meant a palace, including a temple and residences for imperial officials and concubines—where, in the afterlife, “the dead would need their favourite objects, as well as things of value, in the other world.” The warriors pose a puzzle: Besides speculating on their function in the mausoleum, scholars question “where the knowledge and inspiration for these lifelike figures came from,” since only miniature statues had been found in earlier tombs and since kilns at the time were too small to fire sculpture of such stature. Based on evidence of Alexander the Great’s campaigns in Asia, some scholars suggest that cultural exchange existed between Greece and China.
A well-informed examination of ongoing efforts to understand the past.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68177-796-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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 Yorkerstaff 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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