Deeply researched and rigorously argued—and certain to raise both hopes and objections.
A scholar and authority on cuneiform presents evidence for the design and location of one of the Seven Wonders of the World: the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
The gardens weren’t actually hanging, and they weren’t in the Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar, writes Dalley, editor and author of numerous scholarly works on Mesopotamia (Myths from Mesopotamia, 1989, etc.). Instead, she argues that they were actually in Nineveh, created at the command of Sennacherib around 700 B.C. Her evidence is principally textual, based on her profound understanding of ancient writing, architecture and even personality. After describing how she became interested in the topic, she notes how efforts to locate the gardens in Babylon have long failed. She then summarizes the classical authors who mentioned the gardens (from Diodorus Siculus to Josephus and others), concluding they were created on artificial terraces, were shaped like an amphitheater and required machinery to bring water to the site. (She includes a couple of speculative drawings.) Dalley then spends time with the invention of the screw (necessary for drawing water to the site), arguing that Archimedes was probably a latecomer to the design. After a chapter on water management in the desert, she describes—in a chapter as dense as an untended garden—how confusions have arisen over the centuries about names and locations. Although her writing is generally scholarly, she does crack wise occasionally—commenting, for example, about the sweet breath of the gods: “no halitosis in heaven,” she quips. Her penultimate chapter deals with a problem: If Nineveh was razed in 612 B.C., how did the Greeks and others learn about the gardens? She argues convincingly for a continuing human presence at the site, despite other accounts, and she lists some lingering speculations.
Deeply researched and rigorously argued—and certain to raise both hopes and objections.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0199662265
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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