A gem. The author’s enthusiasm for her subject and her lighthearted scholarship make this a pleasure to read or just browse....
English journalist Young takes an engaging journey around the human heart, exploring the manifold meanings that have been attached to this vital human organ.
Variously defining the heart as the “the link between flesh and soul and God” and “the home of humanity’s great mystery, great energy, great blessing: love,” the author begins by offering a brief look at the organ itself. In “Chamber One: The Anatomist’s Heart,” she traces the evolution through the ages of knowledge about its anatomy and function, describes what can go wrong with it and how these wrongs are righted. “Chamber Two: The Religious Heart” reveals the roles the heart has played in the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians and Aztecs, Christians, Muslims, and Hindus. Young delineates the magical power attributed to the heart among peoples around the world, illuminating its power as a symbol with such examples as the sacred hearts of Jesus and Mary, bloody sacrifices to the god Quetzacoatl, cannibalistic rituals in ancient Egypt and modern-day China. Her scope is broad in “Chamber Three: The Heart in Art,” encompassing Leonardo drawings, Bernini sculpture, African drums, playing cards, and postage stamps. “Chamber Four: The Lover’s Heart” argues that as the heart sexualizes spirituality so does it spiritualize sex. Here, Young fills her pages with love poems, from the lyrics of a Hank Williams ballad to the sonnets of Shakespeare, and with gruesome tales of love gone wrong. (Apparently, tricking a faithless spouse into eating her slain lover’s heart was once deemed appropriate.) The quote-heavy text is fascinating, along with especially appealing illustrations ranging from cave drawings to Frida Kahlo paintings.
A gem. The author’s enthusiasm for her subject and her lighthearted scholarship make this a pleasure to read or just browse. (80 b&w illustrations, 2 appendices)Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50173-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
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
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
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