Fact or fiction, Atlantis, as the author ably demonstrates, still has the power to enthrall inquiring minds.
Fun, enthusiastic exploration of the fabled lost city of Atlantis and the fascinating group of diverse personalities who have dedicated their lives to proving its existence.
In the world of comics, Atlantis is a fantastical underwater city where blue-skinned denizens thrive deep below the ocean waves. But according to Plato, Atlantis was once a very real civilization, which, despite its unparalleled greatness, ultimately fell prey to a catastrophic natural disaster and was erased from the face of the Earth. Plato wrote about Atlantis, although cryptically, in two separate works following the completion of The Republic. More than 2,000 years later, the great philosopher’s words continue to resonate, spurring wide-eyed explorers to fan out across the globe searching for antiquity’s mysterious “Sea People.” Some see Atlantis and its telltale concurrent rings on the coast of Morocco. Some see it on the island of Malta. Still others insist that Santorini, Greece, is the spot. Adams (Turn Right at Machu Picchu: Rediscovering the Lost City One Step at a Time, 2011, etc.) isn’t quite sure about any of the possible locales or even if Plato was being literal and not just figurative when he wrote about the mighty kings and their awe-inspiring navy. However, it’s clear that the author, a serious journalist who nevertheless grew up on Leonard Nimoy’s In Search of… TV series, wants to believe that mighty Atlantis is indeed waiting to be rediscovered. The collision between Adams’ youthful zeal and journalistic sensibilities provides an arresting dichotomy to an absorbing search. If Plato himself remains nebulous, how reliable are the amateur sleuths and part-time archaeologists who insist that Atlantis must exist as something more than mere allegory? The uncertainty kept Adams off-balance throughout the quest, but it never dampened his spirit of adventure.
Fact or fiction, Atlantis, as the author ably demonstrates, still has the power to enthrall inquiring minds.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0525953708
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
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
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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