Tyldesley does an admirable detective job of reconstructing the boy king’s narrative. Proves that there is no end to the...
A catch-all study by a British Egyptologist of the most famous boy king of the 18th Dynasty.
The search for the probable “truth” behind King Tutankhamen’s short reign (1336–1327 BCE) continues in this engaging reconstruction of his tomb discovery, family and life. Fluent in her subject, Tyldesley (Myths and Legends of Ancient Egypt, 2011, etc.) gives her own spin to the story in order to get beyond the sensational nonsense. She first looks at Howard Carter’s remarkable pinpointing of the tomb named KV 62 in the Valley of the Kings. The 18th Dynasty kings had broken with the earlier tradition of building enormous pyramids in the deserts of northern Egypt and chose instead the remote west-bank valley, clustered around the temple of the ascendant deity of the time, Amen. Bankrolled by George Herbert, aka Lord Carnarvon, Carter discovered in 1922 a tomb improbably crammed with royal objects inscribed with the names of the various 18th Dynasty kings and queens, as well as intact seals of the residing king, Tutankhamen, and his untouched burial chamber. The tomb had apparently been protected and hidden from sight by a flood shortly after burial, then forgotten; moreover, evidence suggested that Tut’s successor, Ay, inheriting the throne as an elderly man, had swapped Tut’s original, large tomb for the one intended for him. Deceptions and lies abound, not only in Carter’s discovery (removal and rearrangement of objects), but in the ensuing autopsies (a missing penis, two mysterious female fetuses). The handling of the artifacts strikes us now as shockingly casual, while the supposed curse of the mummy is merely silly.
Tyldesley does an admirable detective job of reconstructing the boy king’s narrative. Proves that there is no end to the fascination, and speculation, around this subject.Pub Date: March 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-465-02020-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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