The most authoritative, important book on Stonehenge to date.
Renowned archaeologist Pearson (Archaeology/University College London; From Machair to Mountains, 2012, etc.) presents the findings of the most ambitious and scientifically informed investigation of Stonehenge thus far.
Majestic, enigmatic and captivating, the prehistoric monument of Stonehenge is a mystery archaeologists have been struggling to solve for more than 300 years. Here, the author unveils the critical new discoveries made during the massive investigation he oversaw from 2003 to 2009: the Stonehenge Riverside Project. Forty-five excavations within the 6,500-acre Stonehenge World Heritage site revealed Stonehenge to be not just a monument that exists in isolation, but one of many monuments constructed within an ancient sacred landscape. From a massive Neolithic avenue connecting the neighboring wood henge Durrington Walls to the River Avon, to the discovery of 63 ancient cremation burials at Stonehenge, Pearson presents new evidence that indisputably links Stonehenge to a network of similar cremation monuments and ancient cemeteries across greater Britain. The project has also provided a tantalizing glimpse into the lives and minds of Britain’s prehistoric people. Lipid analysis of animal bones discovered at Durrington indicates that feasting took place there on a grand scale during midsummer and midwinter. Along with animal bones in large quantities, an entire Neolithic settlement was unearthed there as well, proving that while Stonehenge was a place that honored the dead, Durrington was a place of celebration for the living. Filled with maps, drawings, photographs and diagrams, the book details the group’s findings in a well-organized, absorbing manner. While the tone is decidedly academic, Pearson’s style is accessible enough—and the information discussed provocative enough—to make this book required reading for serious Anglophiles, students of archaeology and anthropologists alike.
The most authoritative, important book on Stonehenge to date.Pub Date: June 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61519-079-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: The Experiment
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
This memoir of a boy's struggle with a conflicted racial identity too often remains on the emotional surface of its loaded topic. Williams (dean, College of Law/Ohio State Univ.) believed that he was white for the first ten years of his life in 1950s Virginia. Then, when his parents separated, his mother, Lois, went to Washington, D.C., while his father brought him and his brother, Mike, back to his own hometown of Muncie, Ind. There the boys learned that their father, the alcoholic and often unemployable James ``Buster'' Williams, was in fact a light-skinned black man who had, for most of his adult life, chosen to cope with a racism and segregation by ``passing'' as an Italian-American, even calling himself ``Tony.'' Gregory and his brother grew up on the black side of town among their father's relatives. Meanwhile Lois Williams never came to see her two ``colored'' sons, although it later turned out that she had visited her parents in Muncie many times throughout Gregory's adolescence. Though black kids frequently taunted and threatened Gregory for looking white, his light skin bought him few privileges in the white world. After school officials found out that he lived among black people, he had to fight to maintain his position as first-string quarterback, and as he got older, he received warnings not to date white girls. The book promises an intimate view of biracial experience, but Williams often loses his story in well-worn rags-to-riches clichÇs (``Muncie...has lived inside me forever''), and his language is often stilted and formal, which distances both him and his readers from the complex emotions suggested by the story. More frustrating still, events that involve people who are still alive are left unexamined—his eventual marriage, for instance, to a white woman who at one point ended their relationship under pressure from her family. Williams's memoir does illuminate some complexities of the biracial experience, though its reserve keeps other questions in the dark.
Pub Date: Feb. 13, 1995
ISBN: 0-525-93850-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
Sociologist Shorris (Latinos, 1992, etc.) uses anecdotal evidence to humanize this overview of poverty in America while presenting his own very personal point of view on how to remedy it. The result of traveling the country and viewing the worst of American poverty, this study offers views of often ignored impoverished areas (e.g., northern Florida, Jewish Brooklyn) as well as the heavily scrutinized inner city. Shorris coins a unique terminology to define and unite these disparate scenarios—he speaks of the ``surround of force,'' the word ``force'' implying not violence, but the pressures (drugs, hunger, inadequate health care) that plague nearly all poor people. Furthermore, Shorris is careful to make the distinction between ``relative'' and ``absolute'' poverty, noting that American poverty is relative because, via the medium of television, poor Americans are able to see their nonimpoverished countrymen. Shorris's background in academics and philosophy (he was a teenage scholarship student at the University of Chicago in the late 1950s) is apparent, not only through his Aristotelian belief that a political life is the remedy for the problem at hand, but also in his thesis (put to the test in the so-called Clemente Course that he documents in the book's second half) that an education in the humanities could be the solution to multigenerational poverty. While it has become a bit of a truism that only education can truly help the poor, Shorris's innovation is in his emphasis on a liberal education on the order of the Chicago curriculum as he experienced it. While Shorris chooses some curious enemies (for example, while approving of New Deal programs that put the poor to work, he criticizes President Clinton for supporting workfare) and shows his age with his inability to understand inner-city artistic forms like graffiti and hip-hop, he genuinely cares—a characteristic noticeably lacking in many who claim to want to eliminate poverty. (First serial to Harper's)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-393-04554-4
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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