A delightful book that is just plain fun to read, packed with all kinds of curious facts and oddities.
Gordon (An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power, 2004) uses a history of the Washington Monument to present an enjoyable tale of Egypt’s obelisks, the nations who appropriated them, and how they moved them.
The author interlaces the story of the 555-foot-tall Washington Monument, the “tallest structure, by law,” in Washington, D.C., with the tales of ancient Rome, Paris, and London, civilizations that collected as much of Egypt’s antiquity as possible. The book is stuffed with interesting facts, not the least of which are the ingenious methods used to lower, transport, and re-erect the obelisks. Napoleon, even in his military failure in Egypt, mounted a major scientific expedition responsible for finding the Rosetta Stone. It was the carvings on an obelisk that enabled Jean-François Champollion to utilize the stone to decipher hieroglyphics. From the time of Caesar Augustus to the erection of Cleopatra’s Needle in New York’s Central Park, humans have found ways to roll, float, tow, and tip these multiton objects in spaces public and private. One of the smallest obelisks was discovered by England’s great Egyptologist William John Bankes, and it stands today in his gardens in Dorset. Once construction began, Washington’s edifice took 40 years to build. Although it was originally proposed in 1783, actual construction did not begin until 1848. Attempting to secure private funding only held the project back until Congress finally agreed to support it with a grant in 1876. The design was decried as a factory chimney or a stalk of asparagus, but the finished product, with no ornamentation save for an aluminum (more fun facts here) pyramid atop to reflect sunlight, dominates the city and serves as a wonderful symbol of the United States.
A delightful book that is just plain fun to read, packed with all kinds of curious facts and oddities.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62040-650-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
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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