An entertaining, illuminating adventure story by a modern-day explorer.
The memoir of a world-renowned archaeologist and Egyptologist.
Ryan (The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Lost Civilizations, 2007, etc.) takes the reader behind the scenes of the life of a typical archaeologist, who leads anything but the “dangerous, swashbuckling life” of characters like Indiana Jones. While many of his expeditions involve the excitement of discovery, he writes, most of his time is spent meticulously sifting through sand to rescue and piece together buried artifacts and then trying to puzzle out their meaning. Ryan’s first love was mountaineering, but he became fascinated with Egyptology and archaeology during his senior year in college, when he saw the travelling exhibit of King Tut (“a blockbuster exhibition that has yet to be surpassed”) and switched from a major in political science to the study of anthropology and archaeology. During the following years, while he received grants which paid the bills for his explorations in Egypt, he also supported himself, his wife and son by teaching and lecturing, writing books and consulting on BBC specials. On one occasion during filming, he jumped through a cleft in the rocks to rescue a member of the cast caught on a ledge and was almost killed when a dislodged rock hit his head. In 1989, he made the exciting discovery of a mummified body that was later identified as controversial female pharaoh Hatshepsut. Though Ryan made it clear that he was not officially labeling the find as such, the discovery received a premature banner headline in a British paper that read “Ancient Egypt’s Lost Queen Found in Humble Tomb.” In 1995, the author began a seven-year collaboration with Thor Heyerdahl to gather evidence for Heyerdahl’s contention that ancient cultures made contact through ocean voyages. Ryan continues to work diligently at his craft, noting that “each time we come across something new, whether artifacts from the past or ideas from the mind, it’s a discovery.”
An entertaining, illuminating adventure story by a modern-day explorer.Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-173282-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
