by John Man ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2018
A great historical resource about a mysterious people that also shows how women, through the ages, have gathered strength...
Man (Saladin: The Life, The Legend and the Islamic Empire, 2015, etc.) debunks the ancient myths and legendary nonsense surrounding a race of women warriors.
The so-called Amazons left no pottery or jewelry and certainly no settlement that could be excavated. However, there are tombs yielding immense treasures and information, particularly in Tuva, now a semi-autonomous region of Russian. This was the heartland of the Scythians, the people most likely to have produced the Amazons. The region boasts a wide assortment of burial mounds, and the kurgans, or tombs, are evidence of the violent lives lived by the women—and the men—over some 1,500 years (roughly 1000 B.C.E. to 500 C.E.). There absolutely were women warriors who rode horses and fought like men, but the author smoothly and efficiently debunks the many myths associated with them—e.g., the killing of male children or the removal of a girl’s right breast to facilitate the shooting of a bow. It was mainly the Greeks who proliferated the myths about this fierce race of women; in fact, they were obsessed with them. It was a fashion in art to follow mythology, and the Amazons served as a cautionary tale, the symbol of a danger to family and state. Add in xenophobia, and they were the ultimate threat. As the Greeks saw it, it took real heroes, like Achilles, and help from the gods to defeat these warriors, adding to Greek glory. Due to Greek influence, the Amazons were lodged in Europe’s consciousness, advanced by exploration in the new world of South America (a tribe just over the next mountain…), and set in place by novels, Wonder Woman, and other elements of pop culture. “Wonder Woman is even more Amazonian that the Amazons of Greek legend,” writes the author. “[She] is not about to be defeated or bedded, even by superheroes.”
A great historical resource about a mysterious people that also shows how women, through the ages, have gathered strength from each other and continue to do so today.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68177-675-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
HISTORY | ANCIENT | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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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