An entertaining blend of tenacious scholarship, rigorous argument, and lucid exposition. (maps, photos, illustrations,...
Noted Egyptologist El Mahdy (Exploring the World of the Pharaohs, not reviewed) separates legend from history in the story of the king whose short life has long captivated the public.
El Mahdy (whose interest in Egypt began when she was seven years old) declares that she finds the "private face" of the boy-king "far more intriguing than the alluring glitter of the gold he was buried with." In her complex though always engaging narrative El Mahdy accomplishes a number of tasks. She acquaints general readers with the foundations of ancient Egyptian civilization (including geography, religion, family, government, communications, nomenclature, and chronology). She tells the riveting story of the 1922 discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb and the subsequent political struggles for control of the excavation and the artifacts. She relates what has become the "official" account of the boy-king, "the whole" of which, she says, "is completely untrue." And, finally, in a remarkable employment of archaeological evidence to support historical inference she constructs a convincing biography of the mysterious Tutankhamen who was crowned as a 7-year-old 3,500 years ago but ruled only about 9 years. Recognizing that scholarship often "finds a limited reading market, while wild theories . . . reach a wide readership," El Mahdy pauses periodically to puncture the inflated stories about the boy-king and about Egyptology in general. She emphasizes that the Egyptians never placed "a curse on entering a tomb"—quite the contrary (visitors were encouraged)—and she characterizes as "totally fallacious" the popular accounts of King Tut's curse. She argues, as well, against the pervasive notion that the boy-king was murdered ("out of the question," she declares) and establishes an alternative explanation—that he "died suddenly and of natural causes." The book's title is a bit misleading: El Mahdy spends most of her time dismantling the legends about the boy-king and establishing the firm historical foundation of his family. Her reconstruction of his brief life consumes only about 20 pages.
An entertaining blend of tenacious scholarship, rigorous argument, and lucid exposition. (maps, photos, illustrations, diagrams)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-26241-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
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
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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