The author has done her homework, revealing a subject far more complex and interesting than it might seem at first.
An engrossing discussion, lurid title aside, of mummies: how they’re made, where they’re found, what scientists and historians learn from them.
A mummy is a dead human or animal whose soft tissues are preserved. Dry or cold climates do this naturally, but many cultures work to preserve their dead. The popular image of a mummy is the exquisitely decorated Egyptian pharaoh in his tomb, yet this barely scratches the surface: Egyptian rulers tried to monopolize the tradition, but it spread to the nobility and beyond to anyone who could afford it. Thousands of Egyptian mummies have turned up, more than any museum can handle; Egypt, however, is only the tip of the mummy iceberg—hundreds have been found in the bogs of northern Europe, thousands in the deserts of South America, Central Asia, and the American Southwest. Cold temperatures in the Arctic, Andes, and other mountains have preserved prehistoric men (such as the spectacular “Iceman,” a 3,000-year-old hunter found in the Alps). Not all mummies are ancient (witness the discovery recently of famous mountaineer George Mallory, who disappeared on Mount Everest in 1929), and the custom enjoyed a bizarre 20th-century revival under communism (Lenin, Stalin, and Ho Chi Minh were all mummified). Despite purple prose and a tendency to compose fictional dramas on the last hours of those destined to become mummies, science writer Pringle (In Search of Ancient North America, 1996) traveled the world, visited sites and museums, and allowed the experts (often an eccentric bunch) to speak for themselves. Mummies tell us much about ancient life as well as ancient disease, and they exert a peculiar and persistent fascination: Even today, there is an international traffic in mummies and mummy parts.
The author has done her homework, revealing a subject far more complex and interesting than it might seem at first.Pub Date: June 6, 2001
ISBN: 0-7868-6551-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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