by Kara Cooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 6, 2018
Cooney provides welcome insights into pharaonic politics while bringing numerous little-known Egyptian women to the fore.
An accessible spin through the corridors of power in ancient Egypt, corridors that converged on thrones on which women reigned.
You wouldn’t know it to read the standard survey texts, but the history of ancient Egypt is punctuated by periods of rule by women—and more of them than just Nefertiti and Cleopatra. Cooney (Egyptology/UCLA; The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut's Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt, 2014) digs into the tombs, papyri, and literature to look at the past of a polity that, though “no less cruel and oppressive to women than every other complex society on Earth,” was not programmatically opposed to the notion that women could rule. Most of these women were on the throne for relatively short periods, often because they stood in when male heirs to the throne were too young or otherwise unable to assume it. One, Merneith, ruled without formal title as regent for one such too-young son; we know little about her largely because “the Egyptians, it seems, never wanted to directly state that the king’s mother was calling the shots.” When her son hit 16 or 17, she continued to advise him behind the scenes. As Cooney notes, it was the last such unacknowledged rule; other women who followed on the throne bore the title “king.” One regent, Hatshepsut, connected to the venerable and powerful bloodline of the 18th Dynasty, was herself only 16 when she ascended the throne, having outlived a number of unlucky brothers (and avoided being married off to one of them, which would have made her queen). The author makes it clear that these female kings could be as tough, and sometimes as sanguinary, as their male counterparts; if forgotten, most were also skillful. The most famous, Cleopatra, was an exception, for Cooney reckons her a failure, having tied her fortunes too closely to a man, if one whose record has also been tarnished by “the Roman misinformation and propaganda campaign against her.”
Cooney provides welcome insights into pharaonic politics while bringing numerous little-known Egyptian women to the fore.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4262-1977-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: National Geographic
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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