Antiquities

Reviews

I am satisfied with this book very imformative easy to understand.Lots of good information. I was pleased with the condition of the book as well and I was satisfied with how quickly I received the book in the mail.

Overall, the book would be a good addition to a home library, but when more professional responses are needed, the reader should be aware that the material is outdated. I purchased the 2003 Reprint in 2004 and it was already out of date then. Many of the resources just aren't available either to verify the information as the text uses such old resources that they are either out of print or just unavailable. One good point... it does give recognition to which is the better rendering of word usage--either the KJV or the NIV.

Though there may be a mistake or error here or there; they are not so serious as to get the student of the Bible into serious doctrinal error. For the most part this book will be a big help for young and old readers alike. As with any dictionary or encyclopedia the infomration is general but often very revealing. This book will be a "cap-filler", as one publisher once put it, in your personal reference library.

This book has many errors, and displays them proudly. It seems to support many misconceptions in people have about the Bible. While claiming to explain what terms in the Bible actually mean, it actually distorts the meaning. For example, it talks about the verse in mark about the camel going through the eye of the needle, and explains how there was a gate called "the needles eye" in Jerusalem. While many laymen believe this, this just ain't so. There has never been any substantial evidence to back up this claim. If one is interested in a book like this, I suggest a book translated from German titled "What the Bible Really Says" or "The Oxford Companion to the Bible." Leave Freeman's book on the shelf.

Out of the 4 or 5 books on Bible manners and customs that reside in my small home library, this book is most definately the best and most used. Freeman presents insightful and relevant cultural background to almost every important verse in every book of the Bible. I wholeheartedly recommend this book to be purchased by anyone remotely interested in the manners and customs of Bible times. It is a real winner and should be in everyone's library

Reviews

I love Clive Cussler's, Dirk Pitt books, and this one as all the rest was great!

My biggest criticism of this book is its excessive length. The story could have been told in half the pages, with no loss of content. Pitt endures unimaginable pain in a series of Peruvian and Mexican adventures to save the lost Incan treasure from landing in the hands of James Bond-like bad guys (which seemed much like the Christopher Walken character in "A View to a Kill"). Along the way, Pitt's girlfriend, the congresswoman, gets kidnapped, and some interesting helicopter action occurs. After you have read a few Cussler adventures, they start to become ho-hum, unfortunately. If this was your first Pitt adventure, I'm sure you will love it.

This was purchased for my legally blind neighbor - he is thrilled. And the price was right!

Clive Cussler has yet to write a bad book! Always a great adventure and interesting characters.

Inca Gold by Clive Cussler is part of the Dirk Pitt Adventure Series. This is what I view as great airplane reading. I prefer to read on long plane trips, as compared to watching the movie or sleeping. On a flight out to the coast, I can usually finish a Clive Cussler book. Sometimes it might take back and forth. On such trips, I find Dirk Pitt to be a good companion. This is basically serial adventure telling and I like this style. This particular book, as with all the Dirk Pitt books, involves a tie between theories about ancient history and modern technology. It involves amazing escapes, beautiful women, and strong, handsome, smart, resourceful men. Meaning it is easy to see myself as the hero, of course. Ok, why only 4 stars? In this book Cussler decides to teach the reader some sort of strange lesson about the metric system. As such, all measures are presented in both traditional US distances and also metric distances. After awhile, this become much more annoying than educational.

Reviews

Bingham is a remarkably under-addressed subject; Heaney's book fills a gap that nobody has really tried to address for several decades now, and it does the job well. Heaney bookends Bingham's story with some reflections of his own, and that is probably the least appealing choice he makes. It's not that his personal experiences are uninteresting-- they just seem like a bit of an afterthought and they made me wonder if this could have made a good Tony Horowitz-style blend of scholarship, travel writing, and history. And the attempt to link Bingham to Indiana Jones is worth perhaps a paragraph here or there, but it's not really a large enough hook to hang the entire book on. All that aside, Heaney has done a nice job with Bingham's story. It's not an easy story to tell-- Bingham is not an altogether admirable man, and he completely blew the chance to find the major goal of all his searching, looking right at the Last City and failing to put the pieces together. And his treatment of the finds that he did uncover is a perfect study is how one country's archaeological scholar is another country's graverobbing thief. On the other hand, Bingham uncovered some very cool and very important stuff and spearheaded a whole wave of discovery of a civilization that might otherwise have been lost to modern knowledge. Heaney does a good job of balancing all of this, painting Bingham as neither an admirable hero or a horrible monster. Ultimately Bingham's story is not only the tale of the fantastic ruins that he uncovered, but modern man's difficult relationship with other times and cultures as well as an illustration of how the quest for knowledge leads through a jungle of many difficult ethical and moral questions. My one beef-- Heaney's descriptions of the ruins made me long for more photos than the few that are included in the book. Order this, but also grab one of the fine photographic records of the ruins.

This book narrates the adventure (and misadventures) of Yale University professor Hiram Bingham in the 1911 discovery of Machu Picchu, currently one of the most popular tourist spots in the Americas. With the help of Peruvian scholars like Carlos Romero and local informants like Juan Quispicusi, Bigham found Vitcos and Espiritu Pampa, scenes of the final moments of Manco Inca, Titu Cusi, and Tupac Arnaru, three of the important and tragic figures in Peruvian history. Machu Picchu represents the Inca Empire at its height, and Vitcos and Espiritu Pampa embody Inca resistance to Spanish impe¬rialism. Bingham did not understand all that he saw, and there were many Peru¬vians who had seen these ruins before him, but his desire to understand them within the story of Spanish and Inca struggle is one of the more compelling acts in the history of exploration. His expedition paid attention to the lives of the humbler members of Inca society; the poor, and the transplanted. He was a man of his time, thoroughly bound by American piety, wealth, and colonialist attitudes towards the native peoples of Latin America. To ex¬plore and excavate, he took advantage of forced Indian labor. He was raised to believe that he is the hero of his life, and obscured the help he received from the many Peruvians who preceded him in the archives and mountains. He loved his discoveries so much that he had to possess their artifacts, losing himself in the moral jungle of that decision. Bingham sought exceptions as a white American and representative of Yale, then bent and broke Peruvian law when he didn't get special treatment. When confronted by his Peruvian collaborators, he quit academics, left Machu Picchu's artifacts at Yale, and went into politics, where he tripped once again. His high-profile expeditions raised Peruvian consciousness and criticisms of foreign ex¬ploitation of its history, unauthorized excavation and the smuggling of artifacts. In one expedition Bingham and his companion named Coot had dodged the famed stick-up artists Butch Cassidy and the Sun¬dance Kid near Bolivia. The two outlaws had robbed a cart carrying one silver mine's payroll the week before and Bolivian soldiers had cornered and shot both the bandits. When this happened, Bingham wrote the story down, not realizing its significance. Historians Anne Meadows and Daniel Buck, however, concluded that the two men were in fact Butch Cassidy and the Sun¬dance Kid. In a strange turn of events Bing¬ham bought one of their mules not realizing his brush with another pair of American legends. While Bingham gets the credit for the discovery of the lost city of Incas, but he is also accused of removing the archeological treasures of Peru in a clandestine fashion and many of them smuggled illegally into this country. The court battle between Yale and Peru is uncalled for; the treasures rightfully belong to Peru and Yale must return the archeological materials. 1. The Machu Picchu Guidebook: A Self-Guided Tour 2. Stone Offerings: Machu Picchu's Terraces of Enlightenment 3. Lost City: The Discovery of Machu Picchu 4. Machu Picchu: The story of the amazing Inkas and their city in the clouds (Wonders of the World Book)

it matters what Yale was like, for Hiram Bingham III.... because you cannot understand his desire to explore South America without understanding why he wished to join the Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War. You cannot understand his academic pursuits without understanding his grandfather's successful book about Hawaii, or his father's translations. The context here is the story, and the story is told in this book wonderfully well. How did Hiram Bingham find Machu Picchu? The narrative weave takes you from Inca temples to Hawaiian missionaries, from penny dreadfuls to serious scholarship, from a lust for gold to questions about the disposition of artifacts. You are never lost, because the text is tight, the story compelling. One begins to think that THIS would make a better Indiana Jones movie, one with true and layered heroes who, yes, make great discoveries, but also who face true ethical dilemmas. And this book was a rip roaring good read. I recommend this highly.

I was interested in learning more about Hiram Bingham after watching an Anthony Bourdain No Reservations video on Peru where he took the train up to Machu Picchu named after Bingham. The author does a great job on Bingham, the city he found, and the controversy with Yale over many of the artifacts. I like this kind of history where there is a mix of secondard, primary, and personal narative. This is a good book and had some parts that I am looking forward to using in my classroom. A very interesting book about an interesting person and place.

Our culture has a habit of idealizing explorers - emphasizing their bravery, energy, intelligence, and determination. Christopher Heaney's story of Hiram Bingham's explorations in Peru, and his "discovery" of Machu Picchu and some other Peruvian locations which were critical in the history of the Incas, combines an appreciation for these traits but tempers this portrait of Bingham with the less savory aspects of first world explorers searching for artifacts in the third world. The book begins with the story of Bingham's childhood, and how the parents who raised him were adventurers themselves. However, they were missionaries and Bingham gradually moved away from religion as he became captivated by history and anthropology. His marriage to a woman from a wealthy family provided him with financial security for his family, freeing him to plan explorations, and his Yale experience gave him connections with wealthy families that would support his expeditions. The "treasures" Bingham sought in Peru were not the type you see in the movies - gold, silver, ornate chalices. He was seeking relics from the lives of the Incas. He went to Peru as a privileged American, who hired help and allowed those hires to essentially force locals into working for the expedition. On one trip the expedition's carelessness for its lower level workers apparently led to the death of one - who was just a boy. Many of the locals were suspicious of Bingham and given their history of subjugation and removal of precious metals by the Spaniards their fears were rational. Bingham's efforts yielded a collection of valuable relics and bones for Yale, and resulted in the people of Peru developing an appreciation for the history of their indigenous people. Some of the items discovered by Bingham remained in Peru, and the nation eventually developed Machu Picchu into an internationally known historic site drawing tourists and scholars. Bingham's work essentially gave Peru a record of its rich history and generated respect for the indigenous people who built Machu Picchu. Heaney also provides the reader with the ugly side of this story. In addition to the fact that many of the workers on his expendition were in essence indentured servants who had been forced to walk away from their farms and families, Bingham's actions were sometimes brazenly dishonest. When the Peruvian government tried to limit the artifacts that would be taken out of the country by Bingham, he secretly purchased many from a private collector snuck them out of the country. In addition, he and Yale refused to return artifacts that the Peruvian government believed were only on loan. The author's last chapter details the efforts the nation has made over the years to have these artifacts returned. This dispute is one of many going on around the world today - nations like Greece are seeking to have historic artifacts returned to them from some of the world's major museums. The issue is a difficult one - it can be argued that museums of international renown are ideal locations for some of these treasures to be available to scholars and tourists to see. However, holding these artifacts in the museums of the world's former plunderers and colonizers seems disrespectful. The author acknowledges these issues, but comes down firmly on the side of Peru in this case. I look forward to reading more of Heaney's work - he avoids the common traps of idealizing or villifying important historical figures, which is an approach readers deserve.