Cliché and convention combine to suffocate—then mummify—a terrific idea. (16 pages color photos; 3 maps, 1 drawing)
A globe-trotting documentary filmmaker and archaeologist visits the sites where mummy-making cultures once thrived and arrives at some unremarkable conclusions.
Reid is persistent and dedicated: a scholar-adventurer. He once spent two years living with the Maku, forest people who hunt, fish, and gather deep in the Amazon. He has crawled around in Romanian caves and hunkered down with Herodotus, Tacitus, and Gilgamesh. And for this excursion—on a travel budget to die for—he visited mummy sites in central Asia, Siberia, Denmark, Egypt, the Canary Islands, North Africa, Chile, and Peru. So the problem is not with his persistence or his courage (he is an intrepid traveler, confirmed here by his gripping account of a horseback ride through the Andes—on a tough little steed and a sour stomach); it is with his writing, which ranges from a breathless gee-whiz boyish exuberance to the most common clichés of the Near Death Experience crowd. When he sees something he likes, warm glows spread through him and bells ring (or sparks go off) in his head. Despite the abundant treacle and triteness, there is much of interest—notably the many illustrations of Mummies of the World. Reid says he wished to determine if there were any connections among the mummy-makers, to discover the various reasons for mummification, and to explore the techniques involved. And so we learn a bit about the Pazyrk method of preserving (Siberia), the Danish Iron Age practice of tossing the victims of executions into peat bogs (where, centuries later, well preserved, they sometime bob to the surface), the somewhat familiar process employed by the Egyptians, and Reid’s principal insight: that Berbers (North Africa) may have sailed west to the Canaries and continued their mummy-practices there. Another gem: some ancient Peruvians may have practiced trepanning for pleasure. On a more personal and poignant note, Reid tries to come to terms with the untimely death of his closest friend.
Cliché and convention combine to suffocate—then mummify—a terrific idea. (16 pages color photos; 3 maps, 1 drawing)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-28006-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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