Of course, there are still questions (“Certainty plays little role in the history of Hatshepsut”), but Cooney’s detective...
Cooney (Egyptian Art and Architecture/UCLA) re-creates the life of “the first woman to exercise long-term rule over Egypt as a king.”
The author endeavors to discover why history rejected Hatshepsut’s remarkable achievements. Twenty-five years after her death, her surviving co-king decided to obliterate her image and name from carvings throughout the land. As Cooney admits, this biography could only be based on conjecture and guesswork, but the addition of expertise makes it well worth reading. The author’s Egyptology background provides the nitty-gritty of daily life and animates this king (at the time, there was no word for “queen”). The surviving buildings and carvings of Hatshepsut’s 22-year reign serve as evidence of her accomplishments. Upon the death of her father, Thutmose, Hatshepsut was married, as was customary, to her brother, the short-lived Thutmose II. She was already Egypt’s high priestess, and she now became the King’s Great Wife. Widowed after a few years, she became regent for the infant Thutmose III, making her the most powerful person in Egypt. Eventually, she had herself crowned king and reigned with him until her death. How she gathered and maintained her power is simple enough: money. It was a period of strong trade, uninterrupted annual inundation of the Nile River and successful empire building. Hatshepsut professionalized the priesthood and the army, and she spent fortunes expanding the empire and quickly rewarding those who served her. Furthermore, as high priestess, it was she who delivered Amun-Re’s rules and decisions. The image of this woman became increasingly masculinized as her reign progressed, reflecting the age-old distrust of a woman with authority.
Of course, there are still questions (“Certainty plays little role in the history of Hatshepsut”), but Cooney’s detective work finally brings out the story of a great woman’s reign.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-307-95676-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
