An engaging work of scholarly detection honoring a wacky hero who, it turns out, was right about a few things.
Here’s one thing Donovan and Ignatius Donnelly didn’t know: The Atlanteans ate lutefisk.
Atlantis has been a puzzle since Plato wrote obliquely of it 2,500 years ago, and the notion of a highly evolved civilization that one day disappeared under the waves continues to exert its hold. King (European History/Univ. of Kentucky) uncovers one of the Lost Continent’s most unlikely champions in this portrait of the Swedish scholar Olof Rudbeck, who grew up in a time and place that seems to have encouraged certain eccentricities. After all, Sweden’s Queen Christina had recently “converted to Catholicism, renounced the Swedish throne, and moved to Rome, where she allegedly rode into town dressed as an Amazon warrior.” Rudbeck, for his part, attracted attention by wading into a pile of cow in an Uppsala marketplace, where he discovered the lymphatic system and “correctly explained its functions in the body.” Appointed rector of Uppsala University in 1661, Rudbeck fell afoul of inquisitors intent on proving him a Cartesian heretic, but Rudbeck had weirder ambitions; on the shakiest of linguistic grounds, and working with a body of legend, folklore, and sagas, he set out to prove that the nearby countryside was the land of the Hyperboreans, that his hometown was once the capital of a vanished civilization, and that it was “absolutely urgent to rekindle the wisdom of Atlantis.” He brushed aside learned objections to his theories—yes, Atlantis was supposed to be an island, but Sweden was a peninsula, and that was close enough—and, indeed, brushed aside some of his official responsibilities while compiling a 2,500-page opus called the Atlantica and hunting funds to publish it. He finally secured them from Sweden’s king, but to not much avail, for historians even then were insisting on stronger evidence than mere conjecture, and “Rudbeck’s name was becoming synonymous, at least in some circles, with wild theorizing.” The result: the published volumes, too, all but disappeared.
An engaging work of scholarly detection honoring a wacky hero who, it turns out, was right about a few things.Pub Date: June 14, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4752-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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