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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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