A vigorous rendering of the remote past.
A universe of blood, violence, and magic.
In the 11th volume of a project that began in 1983, Italian publisher, translator, and polymath Calasso (1941-2021) continues his investigation of ancient religion and philosophy with an interpretation of Mesopotamian mythology. Translated by Parks, the narrative unfolds as a conversation between Utnapishtim and Sindbad, a sailor who washes up on the island of Dilmun, where Utnapishtim has lived for thousands of years under the protection of Ea, god of fresh water. “I would have liked to be someone who dwells in the midst of everything and sees afar,” he tells the sailor. “Instead, my fate has been to see afar, but from a place no one else can reach.” Central to his stories are a host of vengeful, capricious, murderous gods who create humans from clay and gods’ blood only to become annoyed when their creations become too boisterous and noisy. The solution: a flood to destroy the Earth and its unruly inhabitants. But at Ea’s bidding, Utnapishtim builds a vessel to save all living creatures and is rewarded by spending eternity on Dilmun. Foremost among the magical objects coveted by gods and men is the Tablet of Destinies, “in which everything that was and was becoming the world could concentrate.” The Tablet instructed “how to celebrate the rites and implement the law.” It ensured order. Men yearn for certainty, Utnapishtim observes, for which they make sacrifices to appease gods; protect themselves “behind a barrier of prayers, invocations, exorcisms”; and worship talismans, spells, and omens. “We lived in terror of everything that happens by chance,” he admits. “A few signs etched on a clay tablet went some way to keeping things in check.” Calasso depicts a blood-soaked universe where hundreds of gods battle for supremacy and where men prefer “to live bound tight by destiny than abandoned to the turbulence of chance.”
A vigorous rendering of the remote past.Pub Date: July 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-60501-8
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
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 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
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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