Slipshod, ill argued, and just weird enough to almost be interesting: a loopy work that trained Egyptologists won’t bother...
So the mummy’s curse killed Sigmund Freud, not some mundane old cancer. Who knew?
It’s tempting to read this breathless tale, a work of Egyptology gone weirdly awry, as a parody of the buried treasures/hidden secrets subgenre of pop archaeology so brilliantly exploited in the old (and new) Mummy movies: Bad archaeologist does bad things and is punished for his crimes, usually by the creature that dwells in the tomb he’s uncovered. In O’Farrell’s recounting, told with utter seriousness, the bad archaeologist is none other than the great Howard Carter, who with his patron and sometime ally Lord Carnarvon discovered the tomb of the unfortunate pharaoh Tutankhamun back in 1923 and then proceeded to drop dead, along with most other people connected with their expedition, a sequence of events that gave rise to the legend of the “mummy’s curse.” (Breathe a little centuries-old tomb dust, and chances are you won’t feel too hot yourself.) These deaths weren’t accidental, O’Farrell asserts. He holds that Carter and Carnarvon “manipulated the media and the politicians of the world with an adroitness that would be the envy of any modern press baron or spin doctor, but, in the course of their robbery”—for so O’Farrell holds their discovery was—“which took them nearly ten years to pull off, they uncovered a secret so potentially explosive that even they didn’t know how to exploit it.” And what was that secret? Well, it would spoil O’Farrell’s fun to reveal too much; suffice it to say that taking his thesis seriously involves a wholesale rewriting of Old and even New Testament history, one that turns Akenhaten into Moses and makes Old King Tut a descendant of Abraham—a neat genealogical trick, but offered without a shred of credible evidence, in keeping with the author’s overall tenor.
Slipshod, ill argued, and just weird enough to almost be interesting: a loopy work that trained Egyptologists won’t bother opening, but that may appeal to the UFO-abduction/cloned-baby set.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-330-48168-1
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Pan UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
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
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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