Plato's myth of Atlantis—a lost continent, according to the Timaeus, that was destroyed by a cataclysmic flood over 11,000 years ago—has bedeviled archaeologists, historians, and occultists for millennia. Is Atlantis fact or fiction? If fact, where was it located? Zangger, a prominent geoarchaeologist, offers a novel and witty solution to the mystery. Researchers have place Atlantis everywhere from Malta to Greenland to outer space. Zangger, who has no truck with his subject's occult reputation, proposes a rather more mundane answer: That Plato's account of Atlantis is actually a ``coded'' history of the Trojan War, Atlantis itself being Troy at its peak, circa 1300 B.C. Zangger makes his case with sterling scholarship, first reviewing ancient Greek history and then offering a point-by-point analysis of Plato's accounts in light of modern archaeological knowledge. To reconstruct Bronze Age Troy, Zangger leans heavily on Homer's account in the Odyssey, perhaps a risky venture. More persuasive, if also more boring, are his attempts to chart the Trojan landscape, both citadel and plain, by using Landsat satellite images, 19th-century maps, and his own observations. Zangger's wit triumphs at the end, as he examines and rejects eight ``counterarguments and shortcomings'' to his thesis and spurns convention in favor of inspiration, inhibition in favor of fun. Zangger's ``solution,'' no doubt, will take its place as just one more entry in the colorful history of the Sunken Continent. But don't let his thesis get lost in the shuffle: In the barren land of serious Atlantean studies, it's like manna from heaven. (Thirty- four b&w photos, 24 maps—not seen.)
Pub Date: Aug. 20, 1992
ISBN: 0-688-11350-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1992
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
Did you like this book?
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
15
GET IT
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 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | UNITED STATES | HISTORY | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ETHNICITY & RACE
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2022 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
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.
