Time has not been kind to the Philistines. Thanks to sketchy references in the Bible, they're remembered, if at all, as a warlike race of uncouth barbarians notable mainly for producing such villains as Delilah and Goliath. As the archaeologist authors of the fascinating work at hand make clear, however, folkloric perceptions of the Philistines fall well short of gospel truth. Having spent over 30 years investigating one of biblical history's greatest mysteries—the identity of the invaders whose protracted conflict with Israelites made their very name synonymous with brutishness—the Dothans are able to provide a partial portrait of these so-called ``People of the Sea.'' While much remains to be learned of their language and origins, the Philistines were almost certainly part of an exodus from the Aegean Basin during the political/population upheavals that marked the transition from the Bronze to the Iron Age. Defeated in battle by Egypt's Ramses III early in the 12th century B.C., the Philistines were settled along the southern coast of Canaan, claiming as their homeland an area extending from Gaza to modern Tel Aviv. On the evidence of the material unearthed at excavation sites throughout the region, the authors conclude that Philistines brought with them an advanced culture that was strikingly enriched by contacts with city-states in every corner of the ancient Mediterranean world. The Dothans have played prominent roles in recent discoveries about the Philistines, and, accordingly, they are remarkably well qualified to combine low-key accounts of their own contributions with those of other scholars (past as well as present) to shed considerable light on a classically lost civilization whose realities have proved greatly at odds with its latter-day image. Authoritative, accessible, absorbing. (Photos, maps, 16-page color insert—not seen.)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-02-532261-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1992
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 Yorker staff 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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