An absorbing scholarly biography, based on a meticulous review of the archaeological record, of a remarkable woman who ruled as pharaoh for 20 years in Egypt's Eighteenth Dynasty (c. 1490 b.c.). Although an important pharaoh whose rule was notable for internal order and other significant achievements, Hatchepsut has suffered, Tyldesley (Archaeology/Liverpool Univ.) argues, from an unjust obscurity, born mostly from her enemies' determined efforts to obliterate her memory and from a consequent paucity of archaeological evidence about her. The daughter of Tuthmosis I and widowed by her half-brother and husband, Tuthmosis II, Hatchepsut became queen regent for the infant Tuthmosis III, whose mother was a member of the royal harem. As Tyldesley relates, Hatchepsut was a model regent at first, but in the seventh year of the reign she became pharaoh, assuming the title King of Egypt (there was no term for queen) and taking on the symbolic masculine aspects of her role, including the traditional false beard. Tyldesley contends that, contrary to a common interpretation, Hatchepsut's behavior was not that of an obsessed power-grabber, but of a typical pharaoh; she allowed Tuthmosis III to obtain the traditional pharaonic military education, she ruled with him as co-regent, and her long rule was characterized by economic prosperity and extensive monument-building, the traditional preoccupations of New Kingdom monarchs. Tyldesley argues that evidence of military conquest during Hatchepsut's reign is slender and questionable, but asserts that there were solid achievements in the realms of trade and exploration. The author speculates on the relationship between the queen and Senenmut, one of several brilliant administrators who made her reign possible. Finally, Tyldesley concludes that Hatchepsut died a natural death (in contrast to arguments that Tuthmosis III orchestrated her death). Tyldesley works closely from surviving texts and fragmentary monuments to recreate vividly an outstanding woman of the ancient past.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-670-85976-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1996
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | WORLD | HISTORY
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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