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 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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