by Immanuel Velikovsky ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 23, 1960
Velikovsky is a controversial figure, whether writing about Worlds in Collision and Ages in Chaos (which do not seem so remote as when he envisioned them)- or today with his provocative theory relating to the Oedipus legend. This is an ingenious and often entertaining and persuasive attempt to equate the myth of King Oedipus with the historical facts about the great Egyptian reformer-king, Akhnaton, Egypt's builder of a monotheistic cult. The drive behind this book is the finding of an historical basis for a familiar myth. Just as Schliemann by his excavations at Troy turned Helen from a legend into a woman of flesh and blood, so Velikovsky approaches the Oedipus myth. The key facets of the myth- the exiled prince who returns to his native land not (even Velikovsky admits) to slay his father but to marry his mother, and who brought destruction thereby upon his native land and was sent forth discredited — can be made, with a bit of pushing and pulling, to apply to the similar story of Akhnaton. Part of the claim is that Thebes in Greece took its name from the older Thebes in Egypt. The Egyptian story is loose and inexact, as reality is apt to be; the Greek myth is tightened by the Greek gift for story telling. It will be for scholars and Egyptologists to explore Velikovsky's thesis. His scholarship in this field has yet to be proved, though as usual he has used his theme as a book to hang his very considerable fund of knowledge and his inexhaustible fancies on. He writes with imagination and style. This book, however controversial, is certainly entertaining. It may even serve to take readers back to Sophocles.
Pub Date: March 23, 1960
ISBN: 0671831933
Page Count: 255
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1960
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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