From Aswan to Cairo, encompassing deserts and oases, Wilkinson proves to be a pleasant, nondidactic and always-informative...
Gently meandering tour of the Nile River in the company of a deeply knowledgeable guide.
To understand the cataclysmic changes gripping Egypt at the moment, eminent British Egyptologist Wilkinson (The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, 2011, etc.) urges a return to the heart of the country, the Nile, the source of the country’s economy, spiritual beliefs and political structure. He moves from Upper Egypt to Lower, starting at the First Cataract, which, until the completion of the High Dam at Aswan in 1964, would send torrents of water from the rains flooding the plains in mid-summer, inundating the fields not just with water, but fertile silt, renewing its annual fecundity and connecting all the settlements along the way. Measured by a rock-cut Nilometer, which allowed the earliest governments literally to plan the year’s budget and wealth, the floods gave rise to the agricultural richness of the region from prehistoric times. The Nubian trading centers near Aswan, the Jewish community that once thrived on Elephantine Island, the great Pharaonic civilizations, and Ptolemaic and Roman periods—all of these civilizations required the ferrying of people and transport of goods and building stones from the quarries. Thanks to later visitors like Napoleon, Scottish painter David Roberts, tour operator Thomas Cook, Victorian tourist Amelia Edwards and amateur archaeologist Lord Carnarvon and others, Egyptian treasures have been revealed and preserved, though also sadly removed from the country. Wilkinson’s erudition is marvelously nuanced—e.g., when he points out how the tomb workers in the village of Deir el-Medina near Thebes went on strike, during the reign of Ramesses III, thus holding the government accountable in what was certainly one of the first instances of civil awareness.
From Aswan to Cairo, encompassing deserts and oases, Wilkinson proves to be a pleasant, nondidactic and always-informative travel companion.Pub Date: June 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-35155-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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