The authors know their Egyptology, and in them Champollion has found worthy champions. Their highly readable account will be...
A taut story of 19th-century scholarly research by husband-and-wife archaeologists, with lashes of intrigue and scandal thrown in for good measure.
If, as some historians have suggested, Napoleon conquered Egypt in order to liken himself to Caesar and thus circle the wagons of history, his erstwhile subject Jean François Champollion took it on for quite another purpose: he wanted to “investigate the creation of the world and the beginning of time itself.” Grand though his ambition was, Champollion was no Indiana Jones. A sickly and frail child, he showed an unusual ability to learn languages from the ground up, mastering Greek and Latin by the time he was 12 and learning many other ancient and modern tongues (although he never quite grasped German). He was also blessed with an extraordinary visual memory, which allowed him to pick up patterns in arcane alphabets that other scholars missed. Applying these talents to ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, which had not been used for a millennium-and-a-half, he spent the better part of two decades puzzling over textual and epigraphic evidence, sorting out syllables and phonemes and breaking much new ground—an achievement that infuriated his rivals, foremost among them the English scholar Thomas Young and the Swedish archaeologist Johan Akerblad, who sought to be the first to decipher the ancient code. Young accused Champollion, groundlessly, of plagiarism and evidenced a keen hatred for his French counterpart that poisoned the professional literature for years. Champollion’s poor health kept him out of the field, and even his desk work took its toll; toward the end of his life, he complained that “My last picture with 700 hieroglyphic and hieratic signs has killed me.”
The authors know their Egyptology, and in them Champollion has found worthy champions. Their highly readable account will be of wide interest to students of ancient history and cryptology—and to anyone who enjoys a bookish detective story.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-06-019439-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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