Even so, Stille is an exemplary reporter, and he offers here just the thing to add to a history buff’s stack of bedside...
On deteriorating masterpieces, disintegrating temples, declining Latin, and other markers of the race to save history from humanity.
“Our society is in the midst of a fundamental rupture with the past,” writes New Yorker contributor Stille (Excellent Cadavers, 1995, etc.). This break, he adds, isn’t a result just of the historical amnesia born of a television age but is also a result of disappearing antiquities themselves: our knowledge of the past, of earlier peoples, and even of nature increases exponentially while the objects of study themselves are disappearing, whether to the tomb, the robber’s shovel, or Taliban cannons. Stille’s 11 pieces here, most previously published in the New Yorker, address this loss while looking at varied attempts by individuals (and by a few organizations) to reverse it. The author writes, for example, about American primatologist Patricia Wright, who, “great at politicking,” all but single-handedly created Madagascar’s Ranomafana National Park, a preserve for lemurs and other endangered species; about University of Chicago scholar Mark Lehner, who is laboring against all odds to prevent further destruction of Egypt’s Giza pyramid complex; and, most entertaining of all, about the American expatriate priest Reginald Foster, who has launched a highly influential if idiosyncratic movement to restore Latin to the status of a living language. Individually, the pieces are pleasures, bearing all the hallmarks of New Yorker–style comprehensive yet accessible approach to the weightiest of matters. But they’re not equally successful at adding up to a sustained argument, a weakness revealed clearly in the ill-advised concluding chapter, which attempts to tie it all together with a string of truisms about the deleterious effects of modern habits on things and ways of the past.
Even so, Stille is an exemplary reporter, and he offers here just the thing to add to a history buff’s stack of bedside reading.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-15977-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2002
In the latest leg of an idiosyncratic intellectual journey, Pellegrino looks at the stories of the Old Testament through the lenses of genetics, paleontology, and archaeology. Pellegrino (Unearthing Atlantis, 1990, etc.) has an autodidact's omnivorous curiosity to match his high-flying imagination. In this new hodgepodge, he expands on the speculations he put forward in his previous expedition into antiquity, in which he hypothesized that the volcano-buried Minoan city of Thera was the inspiration for the legendary Atlantis. Here he conjectures that when an eruption in the second millennium b.c. obliterated the Minoan civilization, its long-distance effects may have been responsible for the plagues of Egypt and the Aegean diaspora that brought the Philistines to Canaan. He also annexes other theories having to do with the contentious ``Mitochondrial Eve'' hypothesis (based on mitochondrial DNA research, it theorizes that genetic the mother of us all lived between 250,000 and 140,000 b.c.) and the Ark of the Covenant's wanderings. Using diverse scientific sources and historical perspectives—Sumerian clay tablets, Egyptian steles, the writings of Herodotus, and, naturally, the Bible—he ``telescopes'' anthropological and archaeological theories to fit Biblical myths like those of Noah and Nimrod, compressing patterns of history into oral tradition's legends. With a natural sense of storytelling, he blends theories of antiquity with the adventures of field work: He is best describing the modern difficulties of conducting digs in Gaza, Jericho, and Iraq (where he radically situates the Biblical Cities of the Plain destroyed by God's wrath). There is, however, a good deal of padding by this accidental archaeologist: reconstructed dialogue, digression, repetition, and flights of fancy that leave solid ground far below. For all its interdisciplinary breadth and originality, this reads like a beery breeze-shooting session with a college prof. (16 pages of b&w drawings, maps, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-40006-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Roberti, a former Hong Kong correspondent for AsiaWeek, has followed the convoluted negotiations between China and Britain over the last few years and has produced a formidable narrative of high diplomatic deception and expediency. Britain took Hong Kong from China on a 99-year lease due to expire in 1997. But China has always tolerated this high-powered capitalist outpost not so much because of the technicalities of a lease as for the huge quantities of hard currency she derived from it. Roberti, like many, seems to think that the British had a shot at keeping Hong Kong out of China's clutches. But Britain wanted good relations with the Communist giant and was not prepared to sour them over Hong Kong. He also points the finger of accusation at Hong Kong's own commercial elite, who, he claims, wanted a no- fuss complicity with Beijing at the price of suppressing democracy: ``an unholy alliance of capitalists and communists.'' A colony lawyer named Martin Lee, however, had misgivings, aroused by the treaty signed by Margaret Thatcher and Zhao Ziyang in 1984. ``One country, two systems,'' the promise of a democratic Hong Kong allied with mainland China, seemed unlikely. Giving a voice to Hong Kong's ordinary people, Lee organized vociferous protest against the British sell-out. In the process, he became ``more recognizable than the governor and more popular than many pop stars.'' But the pro-democracy movement has made no difference to the eventual outcome. And here there are unpleasant truths that Roberti seems reluctant to face. Were the British really ``forcing'' Hong Kong to live under a dictatorship? The reality, surely, was that the territory's residents no longer had the power to back their wishes up. The notion of a conspiracy, though, always makes for a better read, and Roberti is certainly deft in showing us one. A shame only that he could not come up with a better villain than poor old knock-kneed Britain.
Pub Date: Sept. 2, 1994
ISBN: 0-471-02621-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
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