The fascinating story of a figure who deserves to be much better known.
Seyler (Emerita, English/Northern Virginia Community Coll.) delivers a biography of William Bankes (1786-1855), one of the first Europeans to document the ruins of ancient Egypt.
A college friend of Lord Byron, a gifted painter and avid art collector, Bankes was a pioneer of archaeology. Handsome and witty, he was also gay in an era when that was a capital offense in Britain. He attended Cambridge, served a term in Commons, and in 1813, decided to see life outside England. He headed first to Spain and Portugal and began collecting art, much of it still on display in his Dorsetshire home, Kingston Lacy. In 1815, he decided on a voyage up the Nile. There, he copied art and inscriptions in tombs and temples and made careful notes of their layouts. With a few companions from his Nile trip, Bankes traveled to Palestine, disguising himself as an Arab to gain entry to sites where Europeans were unwelcome. Returning to Egypt, he made an even longer journey up the Nile, visiting numerous sites and copying inscriptions, including an important list of kings from a temple in Abydos. His careful documentation facilitated the eventual decoding of hieroglyphics. In 1820, he returned to England, where his travels brought him brief fame—but his failure to write up his discoveries denied him real recognition. In 1833, he was caught in a compromising position with a soldier. With the help of influential friends, he was acquitted, and he managed to keep a low profile until 1841, when he was arrested a second time. He fled the country and spent his final years in Italy, still buying art to send back home. Though Seyler is sometimes hazy on chronology, she provides a solid account of her subject, who was in the right place when there was important work to be done on Egypt.
The fascinating story of a figure who deserves to be much better known.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63388-036-8
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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