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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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