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
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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