A painstaking work of research and careful observation.
A rich tapestry of Nile lore and legend, stretching from the ancients to the fall of the latest tyrant.
British author Twigger (Dr. Ragab’s Universal Language, 2009, etc.) lived in Cairo for seven years before fleeing the revolution in 2011. Here, the author compiles a vast compendium of drama and history around the attempts to control the Nile. Somewhat chronological but hardly linear, Twigger’s labor of love meanders, much like its subject. History itself began there, in the Great Rift Valley of East Africa, from which emerged not one but three Niles: The Blue Nile rises in Ethiopia; the White in central Africa; and the mighty Red flowing from Lake Victoria (fed by the Kagera River coming down from the so-called Mountains of the Moon, which Twigger maintains is the Nile’s true source) to the Mediterranean Delta. Why is it red? That is the color of the silt, as well as the rare algal bloom known to turn the surface red and kill the fish, which might explain Egypt’s first plague: the “river of blood” Moses created when he struck the surface as dictated by God. Nonetheless, red is the color of blood, life, violence, passion and revolution, and the Nile delivers each in turn. The earliest inhabitants of the areas around the river were hunter-gatherers who followed the river as the game roamed and probably gave their things away as they moved rather than hoarding what they could not carry. Especially fascinating is the lore surrounding the powerful and dangerous animals that haunt the river and were depicted by ancients as demigods: baboons, hippos and crocodiles. Indeed, the Nile gave birth not only to mad kings and caliphs, from Cleopatra to Hakim, Napoleon to Lord Kitchener, but the theory of blood circulation, understood by Ibn al-Nafis 400 years before William Harvey.
A painstaking work of research and careful observation.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-05233-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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