A wide-ranging survey of iconic landmarks featuring captivating lore and intriguing ruminations.
Ancient Egyptian obelisks show us deep connections between past and present, according to Ciccone’s winsome cultural meditation.
The author, a self-described “semi-retired world traveler,” recounts his quest to visit all the obelisks—slender, tall, four-sided monoliths tapering to a pyramidal cap—that were quarried from Aswan granite in Upper Egypt, commissioned by pharaohs in the second millennium BCE, among them Queen Hatshepsut and Ramesses II. Ciccone saw 11 such monoliths in Egypt, but he focuses on those that now reside in other countries. They include the obelisk in New York City’s Central Park, which visually rhymes with Manhattan’s ultra-thin skyscraper and, Ciccone contends, symbolizes the supersession of pharaonic absolutism by democracy. Also included is the monolith in Paris’ Place de la Concorde, which, the author asserts, rhymes with the Eiffel Tower and evokes the darkest elements of the French Revolution, and the one in Dorset, England, which has a Greek inscription that helped scholars decipher hieroglyphics and, the author says, bears witness to the need to unite people instead of dividing them. He also looks at eight obelisks brought to ancient Rome, whose people adored everything Egyptian; these monoliths were later topped with crosses and sited at churches. Ciccone’s survey includes informative data on obelisks’ heights, weights, representations of the sun god Ra, and migrations through the world, along with piquant sketches of the sites and colorful anecdotes; one tells of a 19th-century Italian architect who remounted an obelisk got his hand caught between the monolith and its new pedestal, he reports; his hand had to be amputated and remains under the obelisk to this day. Along the way, the author supplies a breezy travelogue and keeps up a perceptive, atmospheric commentary on human nature as revealed in the monuments (“in the growing dusk, with the help of another Scotch, it struck me that obelisks were mysterious—a still not entirely understood product built with a spiritual intent to satisfy ambitions for eternal life by bored and probably scared powerful men”). The result is a charming disquisition on a revealing facet of architectural history.
A wide-ranging survey of iconic landmarks featuring captivating lore and intriguing ruminations.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9798891382596
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Amplify Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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