Knowledgeable fans of Egyptology, cryptography, and languages will enjoy this exploration of the ancient past.
Comprehensive account of a dense and daunting project: deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics two millennia after their composition.
Buchwald, a historian at California Institute of Technology, and writer Josefowicz put a decade’s worth of work into this book, and it shows. Their story begins with a stone tablet bearing three inscriptions, one in ancient Greek, one in hieroglyphic Egyptian, and one in demotic (or “Coptic”) script. French troops had mauled it to keep it from their British enemies during the Napoleonic Wars, but the damage wasn’t catastrophic, and the tablet was hauled off as a spoil of war, delivered to London in 1802. British scientists puzzled over the thing and then published not entirely accurate lithographs of the Rosetta Stone that found their way into scholarly journals in Britain and France. Enter Jean-François Champollion, “a fiery Bonapartist…[who] narrowly avoided incarceration and worse during the Bourbon Restoration.” An atheist and freethinker, Champollion set to work with an idea that was shared by Thomas Young, an older, pious Englishman who was much better grounded in mathematics (and thus cryptography): that the texts said the same thing, so that using the Greek, which was known, one might figure out the corresponding Egyptian characters. Both worked on their translations for years, sometimes sniping at, sometimes collaborating with each other. Buchwald and Josefowicz deliver an account that sometimes seems as if in real time, describing the blind alleys, intuitions, and thorny debates that surrounded the scholars’ investigations. For example, “Young happily conceded that orthographic shifts could and did occur as writers labored to effect accurate transcriptions…[but] maintained that Egyptian hieroglyphs had never changed from the originals, neither in shape nor in meaning.” Readers will find some grounding in linguistics to be helpful, as the authors discuss phonetics, phonemics, morphemics, and other technical matters surrounding whether the hieroglyphics in particular represented sounds, words, or concepts—the answer being “all of the above.”
Knowledgeable fans of Egyptology, cryptography, and languages will enjoy this exploration of the ancient past.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-691-20090-3
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist (1900–45) collected his work from WWII in two bestselling volumes, this second published in 1944, a year before Pyle was killed by a sniper’s bullet on Okinawa. In his fine introduction to this new edition, G. Kurt Piehler (History/Univ. of Tennessee at Knoxville) celebrates Pyle’s “dense, descriptive style” and his unusual feel for the quotidian GI experience—a personal and human side to war left out of reporting on generals and their strategies. Though Piehler’s reminder about wartime censorship seems beside the point, his biographical context—Pyle was escaping a troubled marriage—is valuable. Kirkus, at the time, noted the hoopla over Pyle (Pulitzer, hugely popular syndicated column, BOMC hype) and decided it was all worth it: “the book doesn’t let the reader down.” Pyle, of course, captures “the human qualities” of men in combat, but he also provides “an extraordinary sense of the scope of the European war fronts, the variety of services involved, the men and their officers.” Despite Piehler’s current argument that Pyle ignored much of the war (particularly the seamier stuff), Kirkus in 1944 marveled at how much he was able to cover. Back then, we thought, “here’s a book that needs no selling.” Nowadays, a firm push might be needed to renew interest in this classic of modern journalism.
Pub Date: April 26, 2001
ISBN: 0-8032-8768-2
Page Count: 513
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.
A wide-ranging critique of leftist politics as not being left enough.
Continuing his examination of progressive reform movements begun with The Cult of Smart, Marxist analyst deBoer takes on a left wing that, like all political movements, is subject to “the inertia of established systems.” The great moment for the left, he suggests, ought to have been the summer of 2020, when the murder of George Floyd and the accumulated crimes of Donald Trump should have led to more than a minor upheaval. In Minneapolis, he writes, first came the call from the city council to abolish the police, then make reforms, then cut the budget; the grace note was “an increase in funding to the very department it had recently set about to dissolve.” What happened? The author answers with the observation that it is largely those who can afford it who populate the ranks of the progressive movement, and they find other things to do after a while, even as those who stand to benefit most from progressive reform “lack the cultural capital and economic stability to have a presence in our national media and politics.” The resulting “elite capture” explains why the Democratic Party is so ineffectual in truly representing minority and working-class constituents. Dispirited, deBoer writes, “no great American revolution is coming in the early twenty-first century.” Accommodation to gradualism was once counted heresy among doctrinaire Marxists, but deBoer holds that it’s likely the only truly available path toward even small-scale gains. Meanwhile, he scourges nonprofits for diluting the tax base. It would be better, he argues, to tax those who can afford it rather than allowing deductible donations and “reducing the availability of public funds for public uses.” Usefully, the author also argues that identity politics centering on difference will never build a left movement, which instead must find common cause against conservatism and fascism.
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668016015
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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