In Hatchepsut (1996), Tyldesley (Archaeology/Liverpool Univ., England) brought to life an obscure female ruler of ancient Egypt’s 18th Dynasty. Here she does the same for a legendary woman of the same period—the queen of monotheist pharaoh Akhenaten. Nefertiti (literally meaning, “a beautiful woman has come”) became famous with the 1912 discovery by archaeologists of a breathtaking painted bust of her. What little was known of her story suggested dramatic potential: the wife of an intellectual ruler who rejected Egypt’s traditional polytheistic cult in favor of an austere monotheistic religion, Nefertiti was a central figure in the capital city, Akhetaten (now Amarna), founded by her husband. But her life, and his, ended with a mysterious oblivion. As if they had merely vanished, records made no mention of the royal couple. Without resolving the cluster of historic mysteries surrounding Nefertiti, Tyldesley evokes the turbulent reign of Akhenaten, whose cult threatened the power of Egypt’s priesthood and undermined the kingdom’s customary religion. Marshaling archaeological and textual evidence, the author depicts Akhenaten’s family as close-knit, with their idyll interrupted by the sudden death of the couple’s daughters, attributed by Tyldesley to the plague. Reviewing some of the scholarly theories for Nefertiti’s disappearance—that she grew too powerful, ruled Egypt in her own right, or committed a heinous crime and was banished—Tyldesley concludes that insufficient evidence exists to support these theories. More likely, as his consort, Nefertiti simply shared in Akhenaten’s fate when successor Horemheb, a traditionalist, tried to eradicate all memory of the monotheist pharaoh and his descendants. A thoughtful and well-researched re-creation of an extraordinary ancient personality. (16 pages b&w photos, 38 figures, 2 maps)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-670-86998-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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