Of course, there are still questions (“Certainty plays little role in the history of Hatshepsut”), but Cooney’s detective...
Cooney (Egyptian Art and Architecture/UCLA) re-creates the life of “the first woman to exercise long-term rule over Egypt as a king.”
The author endeavors to discover why history rejected Hatshepsut’s remarkable achievements. Twenty-five years after her death, her surviving co-king decided to obliterate her image and name from carvings throughout the land. As Cooney admits, this biography could only be based on conjecture and guesswork, but the addition of expertise makes it well worth reading. The author’s Egyptology background provides the nitty-gritty of daily life and animates this king (at the time, there was no word for “queen”). The surviving buildings and carvings of Hatshepsut’s 22-year reign serve as evidence of her accomplishments. Upon the death of her father, Thutmose, Hatshepsut was married, as was customary, to her brother, the short-lived Thutmose II. She was already Egypt’s high priestess, and she now became the King’s Great Wife. Widowed after a few years, she became regent for the infant Thutmose III, making her the most powerful person in Egypt. Eventually, she had herself crowned king and reigned with him until her death. How she gathered and maintained her power is simple enough: money. It was a period of strong trade, uninterrupted annual inundation of the Nile River and successful empire building. Hatshepsut professionalized the priesthood and the army, and she spent fortunes expanding the empire and quickly rewarding those who served her. Furthermore, as high priestess, it was she who delivered Amun-Re’s rules and decisions. The image of this woman became increasingly masculinized as her reign progressed, reflecting the age-old distrust of a woman with authority.
Of course, there are still questions (“Certainty plays little role in the history of Hatshepsut”), but Cooney’s detective work finally brings out the story of a great woman’s reign.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-307-95676-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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