Well-told story of a life dedicated to scholarship, with great adventures and derring-do an unexpected bonus.
A surprisingly action-packed biography of the soldier, adventurer, athlete, scholar, and diplomat whose exploits in deciphering cuneiform scripts literally forced a revelation of the originality and depth of ancient Mesopotamian cultures onto a skeptical Western world.
Never mind that Sir Henry Rawlinson (1810–95) was essentially James Bond in the flesh a century before Ian Fleming was born. His ultimate impact, British reference-book author Adkins reminds us, was to finally wither the precept universally held in mid-19th-century that if Adam spoke to Eve it was in Hebrew, “the language that was spoken in Paradise.” An English schoolboy who once fretted that his grasp of Greek and Latin might clutter his mind, Rawlinson signed on in his teens as a subaltern in a regiment of native troops in colonial India, where he learned the required fluent Hindustani, then studied Persian. Posted with troops under his command to offer military aid and curry favor for the Empire with the Persian Shah, Rawlinson was eventually able in his spare time to range from Baghdad (then under Turkish rule) to indulge in what became his obsession: inspecting antiquities. His focus narrowed to the cuneiform inscriptions often carved into monuments of apparent great age, as well as pressed into clay tablets littered in mounds of ancient habitation all over the Middle East. At great personal risk, he climbed a sheer rock wall at Bisitun in Persia and, balanced on a rickety ladder, meticulously copied a cuneiform inscription ordained by King Darius in 520 b.c. proclaiming his greatness in three different languages. Adkins posits this, rather than Egypt’s Rosetta Stone, as ultimately the most significant cipher in finally unlocking ancient Sumerian languages (Assyrian and Babylonian), including original parables, law codes, and legends traceable thousands of years later in the Judeo-Christian Bible, including stories of Genesis and the Flood.
Well-told story of a life dedicated to scholarship, with great adventures and derring-do an unexpected bonus.Pub Date: Dec. 13, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-33002-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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