A graceful example of how rigorous scholarship and erudition can inform and animate popular history.
How the epic poem Gilgamesh was composed, modified, recorded on clay in cuneiform, stored, smashed, lost and found.
For this general history and literary detective story, Damrosch (English and Comparative Literature/Columbia Univ.) steps a little outside the groves of academe, in whose shade he’s written and/or edited various scholarly anthologies. He begins with the Eureka! moment in 1872: George Smith, an assistant curator at the British Museum, came across Gilgamesh among the thousands of cuneiform fragments slowly being translated from tablets shipped from the Middle East several decades earlier. When Smith realized the significance of what he had found, Damrosch tells us, he removed some clothing and danced with joy. Subsequent chapters employ a Raiders of the Lost Ark approach to chart the lives and careers of the scholar-adventurers who first explored Assyrian culture by excavating sites in Iraq now associated in the public mind with internecine violence. Among them were Austen Henry Layard and Hormuzd Rassam, who, on a mid-19th-century expedition for the British Museum, uncovered the long-buried ruins of Nineveh (across the Tigris from Mosul) and the royal library containing Gilgamesh. Damrosch offers a long (perhaps overlong) re-telling of Rassam’s difficulties with the mad Abyssian King Theodore, a sanguinary tale told with even greater panache by George MacDonald Fraser in his novel Flashman on the March (2005). Things pick up with the author’s engaging retelling of the story of Gilgamesh, enfolded within the history of Assyrian King Ashurbanipal’s assembly of the world’s greatest library and the destruction of Nineveh after a three-month siege by Babylonian invaders. Fragments of Gilgamesh and thousands of other tablets then lay covered and waiting for centuries, until the arrival of the men Damrosch profiled in the early chapters. In his final pages, the author looks at how Gilgamesh has affected later writers, including Philip Roth, whose The Great American Novel (1973) features a baseball great named Gil Gamesh.
A graceful example of how rigorous scholarship and erudition can inform and animate popular history.Pub Date: March 6, 2007
ISBN: 0-8050-8029-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006
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
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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