A bold revision of ancient history that is well worth reading, even if its conclusions sometimes overshoot the evidence.
A blend of archaeological fact and anthropological speculation by Australian historian Wilson.
The flood as described in Genesis would have brought the world sea level up 6,000 feet, and establishing it as a real event would entail, as Wilson concedes, a “complete revision of all the basic understandings underpinning modern-day geology.” Wilson is not proposing anything so drastic. Rather, he wants to connect a set of flood myths that occurred among ancient peoples in the swathe of land between Greece and India with the recent discovery that the present composition and size of the Black Sea can be dated to 5600 b.c., when the land barrier between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea crumbled. If it fell in one blow, the resulting flood would have caused the fresh-water Black Sea to rise for two years, flooding about 60,000 square miles. Both the extent and speed of the flood would have been catastrophic for humans living around the water. Wilson describes the fascinating underwater explorations of submarine archaeologist Robert Ballard, who has found signs of human habitation seventy kilometers out from the present Black Sea shoreline. Who were they? Wilson believes they are congruent with the goddess-worshipping inhabitants of an Anatolian site, Çatal Hüyük. That site dates from before 6000 b.c. and shows its people to have been sophisticated agriculturalists and weavers. Wilson speculates that when the site was abandoned around, probably because of a climate change, the inhabitants emigrated to the shores of the Black Sea, then a fresh-water lake. Escaping the flood, these people seeded civilization around the Mediterranean, spreading flood myths. Wilson backs up his idea with some dubious sources, such as Robert Graves’s The White Goddess (1948). More troubling, though, is Wilson’s construing of myth solely in terms of “collective memory,” an anthropologically naïve move.
A bold revision of ancient history that is well worth reading, even if its conclusions sometimes overshoot the evidence.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-30400-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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