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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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