An engrossing examination of how archaeologists re-create much of human history, piece by painstaking piece.
Science reporter Johnson (This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All, 2010, etc.) explores the work of archaeologists.
In her latest endeavor, the author, who makes a habit of looking into atypical subjects and then writing about them with brio and dash, takes on the discipline of archaeology, which is on a bit of a hot streak, thanks to technological advances, war, commercial development, violent weather and warming temperatures, all doing their parts to reveal our past. On her journeys, Johnson attended a field-training school—on St. Eustatius in the Caribbean—where she received a glimmering of how backbreaking, tedious work can be imbued with high suspense. Throughout, she demonstrates a learned hand in her minibiographies of various practitioners of the discipline—e.g., Joan Connelly of New York University, who told the author, “Good archaeology fills in the blanks of history. It tells the losers’ story. It teases out the history that falls between the cracks.” Much like Mary Roach, another sharp writer who often tackles a single topic, Johnson casts her net widely, from the Caribbean to Stony Brook and Fishkill, New York, to the Pine Barrens of New Jersey to Agios Georgios, a small village in Greece. However, she’s also mesmerized by the smaller-scale elements: gorgeous blue beads from the wreck of an old galleon, the never-ending steam of lectures and conferences (“The audience at an archaeology lecture is ancient. I watched them stream in, drawn to slides of artifacts and talk of ruins: snowy-haired, with canes and sensible shoes. They listened with hunger”) and the pure, magical allure of the lost: “significant sites that are so humble in appearance, or buried, or otherwise hidden.”
An engrossing examination of how archaeologists re-create much of human history, piece by painstaking piece.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0062127181
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
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