A useful academic work for students of Egyptology and linguistics that may have limited appeal for average readers.
A compact, scholarly linguistic study that sets out to prove the connection between modern Nigerian dialects and the language of ancient Egypt.
Debut author Edie, a native of Nigeria’s Niger Delta region, first came upon the connection between ancient Egyptian and the Nigerian Efik language while attending Texas Southern University. For this comparative linguistics study, the result of more than 20 years of research, Edie focused on the dialects of the Efik—and those of the related Anang and Ibibio peoples—and compared them to the most ancient recorded form of the Egyptian language. He found the languages remarkably similar and concluded that the earliest ancient Greek translators must have misunderstood basic rules of the symbolic Egyptian language. In tables and appendices, he shows how these corrupted translations occurred, using well-known terms and deity names as examples. For instance, he asserts that the word “alchemy,” from which “chemistry” stems, originated not from Arabic, but from the ancient Egyptian/Efik word “ekim.” Many chapters include dense discussions of linguistic variations that may mystify readers without linguistics or anthropology backgrounds. However, history buffs may be intrigued by other similarities the author found between ancient Egyptian and modern Nigerian cultures, including similar laws and taboos, home layouts, music, children’s games and ideas of women’s equality. Edie also boldly concludes that the Greek’s systemic mistranslation was part of an effort to obscure the Egyptian civilization’s accomplishments in mathematics, sciences and the arts and that the Greeks “stealthily claimed many Egyptian cultural and intellectual legacies”—a challenging assertion in the field of ancient studies.
A useful academic work for students of Egyptology and linguistics that may have limited appeal for average readers.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2011
ISBN: 978-1434352460
Page Count: 152
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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