An expansive and encouraging study of humanity’s shared ties.
A behavioral scientist and minister reflects on the common threads that have united humans for millennia.
“Throughout history, rulers of humankind narrowly defined the world’s center to be their own corner of the world,” writes Stoffer. From the Babylonians and Romans to the Zhou dynasty and the Aztecs, imperial civilizations have made dramatic claims about their importance and exceptionalism. In this work, Stoffer argues that our history is more accurately defined by the “unifying forces” that bond humans, not only across geographic space, but also across thousands of years. The book’s opening chapter focuses on humanity’s unique ability to communicate via language and the written word. The author surveys linguistic commonalities found throughout myriad human civilizations and charts the visual connections between ancient cuneiform writing and 21st-century logos and symbolic pictographs. Other chapters analyze similar threads that unite humans across time and space, including the use of money and the creation of laws and universal commandments. Later portions explore the ways in which trade, transportation, and telecommunications have further united humans throughout history. The author also discusses religion; while religious division has been a characteristic of human history for thousands of years, Stoffer reframes the narrative by focusing on the shared elements found throughout most of the world’s faiths, past and present, including grandiose architecture that points to the heavens, calendars centered around key events, and pilgrimage traditions. The author’s interdisciplinary background—he’s served as a behavioral science professor, a U.S. Navy psychologist, and a lay minister—is well suited for this reevaluation of human history, with Stoffer intriguingly blending his historical analysis with psychological observations about the human mind. While not all readers may be convinced by his optimistic conclusion that “humankind continues a trajectory of unification,” this engagingly written work offers much food for thought.
An expansive and encouraging study of humanity’s shared ties.Pub Date: today
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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