Adams presents Davis warts and all, as a callous, scheming tycoon who amassed a fortune and then did an about-face and...
Long before Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter discovered King Tut’s tomb, Theodore Davis (1837–1915) was the driving force in the exploration of the Valley of the Kings. Adams vividly portrays the unlikely robber baron who set the standards for archaeology.
The author intersperses a simple biography of the man in this chronicle of Davis’ 18 major tomb finds. His account of the drive for wealth illustrates the connivance and brutality that were the M.O. of 19th-century American tycoons. While Davis never approached the wealth level of his fellow industrialists, he certainly matched them for ruthlessness, lack of scruples and downright dishonesty. He was a man who saw opportunity and grabbed it, and he watched and learned as lawyers cheated his stepfather of his copper leases, vowing to become as rich and merciless as they. He eventually controlled mineral rights to 400,000 acres in Upper Michigan, and he then set out to “collect” great riches; Egypt became his “project.” Archaeological digs in that era were unscientific and often more destructive than productive, but Davis put his money to work clearing the valley from end to end. His finds included the complete tomb of Tut’s great-grandparents and a gold tomb that was the richest collection to date. More importantly, he published numerous books about his findings, sharing his methodology with the scientific world. Alas, King Tut’s tomb was so magnificent that it relegated Davis’ finds, and the man himself, to the back of the history books.
Adams presents Davis warts and all, as a callous, scheming tycoon who amassed a fortune and then did an about-face and behaved with honesty, responsibility and generosity as he transformed archaeology from glorified grave robbing to a science.Pub Date: June 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-02669-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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