No big deal, for all its breathless delivery, which will doubtless be reproduced in the forthcoming Discovery Channel...
Anticlimactic conjecture regarding the Egyptian pharaoh’s death from historical-mystery writer Doherty (The Godless Man, p. 840, etc.), headmaster of a London school.
He was only 18 when he died in 1323 B.C., but it was no simple ending for King Tutankhamun, writes Doherty. The boy-king’s death falls into the category of “dark and sinister mystery,” yet now modern scholarship has “ripped away the veil of secrecy” to suggest that just maybe—gulp—he was murdered. For years, Egyptologists have speculated over the remains of Tut. Why were his embalming and the other rituals attending his burial done in such haste? Why such a ratty site for so important a person? What about that swelling behind his left ear? Where are his sternum and part of his ribcage? Where, for Amun’s sake, is his brain? After providing an overview of Egyptian dynastic political history and the particular intramural intrigues besetting the House of Tut, Doherty provides a sensible though derivative conclusion: Tut died unexpectedly of a tumor, which may have had something to do with a hereditary disease. Since such a tumor took its own sweet time to do its dirty work, Tut’s sly old Chancellor Ay may have hastened nature’s hand by providing the king with an over-ample draught of painkiller. By quickly sending Tut off on his journey to the Far Horizon, Ay could snatch the throne away from potential rival General Horemheb, who was off soldiering. Of course there are problems with this interpretation, such as an absence of hard evidence (admittedly understandable after 3,300 years) and the fact that it does nothing to explain why Ay chose to honor some burial rituals while ignoring others. But then, Doherty’s interpretation of events also fits snugly, albeit melodramatically, into some historical readings of Tut’s reign.
No big deal, for all its breathless delivery, which will doubtless be reproduced in the forthcoming Discovery Channel documentary based on it.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7867-1075-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
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
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
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