Readers interested in the cognitive aspects of cosmology will enjoy Marchant’s explorations.
A tour of the heavens that centers not so much on outer space as what it does to our inner beings.
For generations, prehistorians have considered the animals painted in ocher and charcoal on the ceilings of caves such as Lascaux to be ritual objects of a kind. But what if they’re really star charts? One scholar calculated the ephemera of 20,000 years ago and then mapped it onto a work of rock art called Bull No. 18. As science journalist Marchant writes, “he found that when the bull was created, the Pleiades were slightly higher above the bull’s back and that Aldebaran (the bull’s eye) was more clearly framed by the Hyades—an even closer match to the painting than they are today.” There’s nothing overly New Age–y about the thought that “Lascaux Cave is as much about cosmology as it is about biology.” Chronicling the history of the Hill of Tara (present-day Ireland), built long before the Great Pyramids, Marchant, who has a doctorate in genetics and medical microbiology, notes the work of a scientist who tried to work out how the ancient monument was oriented toward the sky. Readers will share his sense of wonder at a direct landing of sunlight “right in the tomb’s heart…until the chamber was so bright he could walk around without a lamp, and see the roof twenty feet above.” It’s a short hop from archaeoastronomy to current teleological notions of the “meaning” of the universe. As Marchant writes, “science is based on the idea of studying a purely physical, material reality. Subjective experience is stripped out so we can seek what’s really out there rather than in our imaginations. That has led inexorably to a worldview in which the physical universe is all that exists.” But is there more? That chapter has yet to be written.
Readers interested in the cognitive aspects of cosmology will enjoy Marchant’s explorations.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-18301-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
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
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