Here are some posts I enjoyed this week:
Photos of the discovery of Tutankhamun in color. This is very cool and fun. Thanks to Eric Cline for bringing them to my attention. (The color has been added to the old photos as part of a museum exhibition of Tut. It’s quite effective.) Click here for Mashable.com “King Tut Discovery”
An intriguing article about Josephine Tey in Vanity Fair. I’ve been a fan of Nicola Upson’s mysteries in which Tey is an amateur detective. This woman certainly kept her own mysteries throughout her life. Any of you Josephine Tey fans? During the “Golden Age” when certain rules were expected of a mystery, she wrote unconventional mysteries. Click here for Vanity Fair “Josephine Tey Mystery Novelist”
I loved Stacy Schiff’s Cleopatra, so this review by Slate of latest about the Salem witch trials is disappointing. Sounds like this may not have been a topic suitable for Schiff’s style, but we’ll have to see by reading it. It sounds like the “juicy” personalities that work so well in Schiff’s Cleopatra were missing from the record here. Fiction writers like me can invent them when the record doesn’t supply, but the historian is stuck. I do enjoy writers who can keep to the history but not bore the reader. Engaging historical writing, as opposed to historical fiction, is a fine art practiced by few. Eric Cline’s 1177 B.C. The Year Civilization Collapsed comes to mind as a good example. Click here for Slate “A Suburb of Hell Stacy Schiff’s history of the Salem witch trials”