A lively introduction to world mythology, read through the lens of modern Marvel heroes.
Ancient myths live on.
Captain America, Iron Man, Spider-Man, the Hulk, and their cohort stand as fantastic incarnations of great heroes from the past. Stories of strength and hubris, ingenuity, and craft live on in comics. Meineck, a professor of classics at New York University, invites us to find new meaning in these myths. “In these times of increasingly accelerating technological advancements, when the algorithm is by now certainly out of Pandora’s jar, myths can offer us a path back to our humanity. They can show us what happens when we get too close to the sun and, like Odysseus, remind us that for all our inventiveness, we are only as strong as the earth we live on and where we chose to plant our oar.” Each chapter addresses a character and a legend. We find Helen of Troy and Achilles. We hear the pantheon of Norse Asgard behind Thor and Loki. We remember tales of Atlantis behind Black Panther. We smell the berserkers in Wolverine. There is the legacy of Joseph Campbell in this book—the hero with a thousand faces prompts reflection on just why so many superheroes wear a mask. “Masks are one of the most mythic elements of the Marvel universe,” Meineck writes. “They connect us cognitively and viscerally to the ancient traditions of mythic performance that are found in all our cultures. Masks transport, transform, and take hold of us in ways that sometimes seem to defy explanation.” Our modern comics grant us purgation and catharsis—the emotional and moral goals of tragedy and epic, the feeling, truly, of being a mere mortal, yet capable of great deeds and greatheartedness.
A lively introduction to world mythology, read through the lens of modern Marvel heroes.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2026
ISBN: 9780063382640
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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 Yorkerstaff 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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