Thanks to Mayor’s scholarship, these fearsome fighters are attaining their historical respectability.
An encyclopedic study of the barbarian warrior women of Western Asia, revealing how new archaeological discoveries uphold the long-held myths and legends.
The famed female archers on horseback from the lands the ancient Greeks called Scythia appeared throughout Greek and Roman legend. Mayor (Classics and History of Science/Stanford Univ.; The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy, 2009, etc.) tailors her scholarly work to lay readers, providing a fascinating exploration into the factual identity underpinning the fanciful legends surrounding these wondrous Amazons. Members of nomadic cultures who inhabited the arid steppes in the regions above the Black Sea, Caucasus Mountains and Caspian Sea—extending from Thrace to Mongolia—the Amazons were raised in an egalitarian, horse-centered society in which the girls became “battle-hardened warriors who prized independence and repelled all would-be conquerors.” Though they left no written record, the archaeological discoveries in grave sites reveal their violent lifestyles: Clad in trousers and other clothing similar to that worn by men, they were buried with their horses, battle gear and children. Many of them died from combat injuries, and their corpses showed tattoos and bowed legs from horse riding. While there are known “Nart” sagas, such as a recent one translated from the Circassian language about a leader of nomadic women warriors, the best known stories are from the early Greeks—e.g., Homer and Herodotus, who first recorded the deeds of these “equals of men,” the allies of the Trojans led by Queen Penthesilea, who eventually battled Achilles and lost. Other famous Amazons included Queen Hippolyta, who was killed by Heracles to attain her Golden Girdle, thus setting off for the Athenians a terrible war with the Amazons. Mayor clears away much of the man-hating myths around these redoubtable warriors.
Thanks to Mayor’s scholarship, these fearsome fighters are attaining their historical respectability.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-0691147208
Page Count: 504
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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