A captivating journey with an erudite guide.
An illuminating voyage into marvelous historical sites.
Underlying Hughes’ fascinating tour of the Seven Wonders of the World, a list compiled in the second century B.C.E, are questions about the nature of wonder itself: “why we wonder, why we create, why we choose to remember the wonder of others.” Devoting a chapter to each, Hughes, author of Istanbul and Helen of Troy, describes in rich detail the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia—the only Ancient Wonder on mainland Greece—the Mausoleum of Halikarnassos in what is now southern Turkey, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Pharos Lighthouse at Alexandria. The author imagines how they would have been seen by their original makers as well as what they have meant to those who made long and sometimes arduous pilgrimages to visit them. Around 10 million each year, for example, travel to the Great Pyramid of Giza, constructed 45 centuries ago at the edge of the Libyan desert. More than “a staggeringly audacious and sophisticated act of construction,” the soaring structure of 2.3 million limestone blocks, housing internal burial chambers, is “saturated with symbolic meaning” about the nature of life and death. Of all the Seven Wonders, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon may not ever have existed, although Hughes speculates that they could have been an elevated arboretum within Babylon’s colorful inner walls, irrigated by an innovative water system. Whatever form the gardens took, Hughes asserts, they were expressions of power, both political and technological, the start of “a dangerously domineering relationship with the natural world.” Others of the wonders, too, like the looming statue of Zeus and the tomb, or mausoleum, of King Mausolos, were gargantuan representations of “individual agency and perfect power.”
A captivating journey with an erudite guide.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593686157
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
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 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
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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