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8+ opere 85 membri 3 recensioni

Opere di Gary Haynes

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Star Wars Adventure Journal — Volume 1, Number 1 (1994) — Author "Uninvited Guests" — 33 copie

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The pictures were marvelous and the captions and accompanying text brought the history back to life. I'm no good at reviews, but I definitely enjoyed the book. It brought back memories from history class and childhood, and it was fascinating to read about the inner workings of a news service.

Plus, I "know" the author - we've been on a political mailing list for the last 10+ years.
 
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jenbooks | Oct 5, 2020 |
The Blameless Dead, by Gary Haynes, gives new meaning to “revenge is a dish better served cold.” Revenge is the only motive for the serial killer in this fast paced historical thriller. Yet, the story is so much more. I found it to be an intense and intriguing ride through the darker side of humanity.

The book starts with what appears to be a robbery gone wrong but turns into so much more. When one of the suspects leads an attorney, Gabriel Hall who is representing him, to make connections to his missing niece, Sangmu, the darker side of this story starts to unfold. It is not long before Gabriel connects the dots between this crime and a string of missing girls. Once he has put two and two together he races to find the killer in hopes that he will also find Sungmu.

This book brings to the forefront the true horrors of war by not only addressing the horrors themselves and what humans are capable of doing to others but also the fallout of their actions. I do believe that in this instance the killer is insane, as in the case of Ted Bundy, he was able to hide it for years. In fact, I can see a lot of parallels to Ted Bundy and wonder if the author took some inspiration from his story.

The plot is fast paced and the story line exciting and believable. The author did a good job in researching the underlying facts though I know the story is entirely fictional. I have not read much about the aftermath of WWII especially as it relates to Russia; therefore, I found that part fascinating. The plot was well done and is complex in places. This is one that you will have to pay attention or you will miss an important element.

The only negative is I never really got to know the characters in a way that allowed me to connect with them. This happens sometimes in plot driven stories and is the main reason I rated it four stars instead of five.

I actually found the story difficult to read because of the subject matter. I feel this book is geared more towards a male audience. Therefore, I am recommending it to those readers who like dark, intense thrillers. I think that historical thrillers readers who don’t mind graphic violence and enjoy a fast paced historical thriller will also enjoy this one.

I received a free copy from the publisher in exchange for my honest review.

For more of my reviews, and author interviews, see my blog at www.thespineview.com.
… (altro)
 
Segnalato
purpledog | Mar 10, 2019 |
Another addition to the Western Hemisphere prehistory reading program; previous reviews were The Call of Distant Mammoths and The Settlement of the Americas. Author Gary Hayes is an anthropology professor at UN Reno, and specializes in elephant ecology and South African prehistory.


The first chapters are unsatisfying. Hayes doesn’t want to come out and say whether he believes there was a preClovis culture or not, and waffles around the issue; particularly annoying are his hints – at least I think that’s what he’s hinting at – that “preClovis deniers” are somehow persecuted. I’m also put off by his mention of Vine Deloria; Deloria was a Native American activist know for denying all of North American archaeology and essentially claiming that all Native American origin myths were correct. I get the feeling that his inclusion here is a deference to political correctness and also the subtle suggestion that the preClovis advocates are creating origin myths of their own. Perhaps I’m reading more than is there. (Deloria gets mentioned again in one of the last chapters, this time in a more critical way).


That being said the rest of the book is a very thorough and detailed discussion of what was known about Clovis people as of the 2002 publication date. Hayes’ position is that people from Beringia advanced through an “ice free corridor” between the Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets almost as soon as it opened up; that the characteristic “Clovis point” was developed shortly thereafter (Hayes’ suggests the Southwest at the place of origin but concedes the Great Plains as a possibility); that the Clovis technology quickly spread across North American, either by actual migration of people or by dissemination of technology through some existing preClovis population; and that the Clovis people were responsible for the extinction of the North American megafauna. Hayes coins a new term here: “megamammal”. “Megafauna” is taken to mean anything with of a body weight of more than 40 Kg; “megamammal” is a mammal with a body weight of more than 1000 Kg, which for the time under discussion means mammoths and mastodons.


Hayes makes a number of points that other researchers have mentioned; but it’s still good to summarize them:


* Clovis points are unique to North America and do not appear in Beringia. There are some Clovis points known from Alaska but they seem to represent people who entered from the south, not an early culture that followed the “ice free corridor” south.


* There is very little to Clovis culture other than stone tools. Hayes points out that Upper Paleolithic in Europe has extensive rock art plus “portable” art objects such as the famous “Venus” figurines; in North America, there are a couple of very dubious petroglyphs that might date to Clovis time and a couple of pebbles from Clovis sites that have some scratches that might be anthropogenic.


* Relating to the above, there are a few bone and/or ivory objects sometimes found at Clovis sites; these are thin, wand-line pieces of bone ground to a bevel and/or point at each end. In the literature they are often called “foreshafts”, under the assumption that they were lashed to a Clovis point and then (perhaps socketed) to a spear shaft. Nobody has suggested a reason why it was desirable to do this. It’s also been suggested they were levers used to tighten the lashing on a point; while this has been demonstrated as possible with replicas there’s no archaeological evidence that they were used that way.


* The Clovis people liked it out in the open; there’s little evidence that they ever used caves, rock shelters, or temporary structures. Even at sites were repeatedly used – certain quarries with high-grade tool stone – the Clovis didn’t reuse hearths.


Being an elephant expert, Hayes spends a lot of time discussing sites where Clovis people interacted with megamammals. He builds a case for his later discussion of megafaunal extinction. The debate in anthropological circles goes like this: everybody concedes there are sites where Clovis tools are associated with mammoth or mastodon bones. The argument is over whether these are (1) places where Clovis people killed and butchered an animal, or (2) where Clovis people discovered the carcass of an animal that died of natural causes and salvaged what meat they could, or (3) where long defleshed bones were discovered out on the plains and transported to a Clovis site, possibly as raw material for tools or possibly for unknown reasons. Hayes is very much in favor of Scenario (1); other paleoanthropologists have argued that most sites are Scenario (2), although usually conceding a single true kill site in Arizona and a case where a mammoth skeleton was discovered with eight Clovis points, indicating that the animal had been speared repeatedly but got away and was never butchered. Hayes brings his elephant knowledge to the fore here; to the critics argument that many of the mammoth and mastodon skeletons show no “butcher” marks, he provides photographs of an elephant being butchered in Zimbabwe; the butchers don’t make any of the incised marks on the bones usually interpreted as traces of butchering.


A common criticism of the “Pleistocene overkill” hypothesis is argument from incredulity; people just don’t believe that Clovis people could have killed that many animals. Hayes sets up a fairly elaborate input-output model to make his case. First off, he points on that extant elephants are highly dependent on water and can’t go too far from a water source (Hayes contends that their actual limiting nutrient is iodine but concedes that there is insufficient micronutrient analysis in either extant or extinct elephants to verify this). Next, he notes that elephants are very easy for a hunter to track, providing a picture of an elephant trail in Africa festooned with large lumps of elephant effluvia that would be hard to miss. Finally, he notes – and this is confirmed by some of the other books I’ve read – that the post-glacial North American environment was highly patchy; the broad latitudinal bands of climate and vegetation that characterize it today were not yet present. Thus he argues that mammoths and mastodons were confined to patches with adequate water and perhaps iodine, and they were easy to locate within these patches, but it might be some distance to the next suitable patch.


Then he presents his energy economics argument: of the available Pleistocene fauna, megamammals gave far and away the most return on energy invested in hunting. Even if only a third of the dead animal is butchered and eaten, it’s 30000 Kcal/hr of hunting, compared to 5500 Kcal/hr for bison. It thus would make efficiency sense for the Clovis people to find an “elephant patch” and stay there until every last elephant was killed and eaten before moving on to the next patch; even if other potential prey animals were abundant.


There are a couple of obvious questionably points in this argument. For one thing it doesn’t explain the extinction of the other North American fauna – ground sloths, horses, camels, etc. – in fact it’s an argument against anthropogenic extinction for them, since according to Hayes energy arguments it would make sense to abandon hunting grounds and go looking for more elephants even if there were plenty of other animals around. Hayes does note that various animal bones other than megamammals are sometimes found at Clovis sites, but there is no even arguable kill site for anything but mammoths and mastodons. As a partial counter he points out that with smaller animals meat transport was possible and it wouldn’t make sense to butcher the animal on the spot; he points out that there is no known archaeological kill site for whitetail deer in North America, despite abundant evidence that Native Americans hunted them in historic times. Perhaps; I still would expect a ground sloth kill site here and there.


A second counter-argument is that the energy efficiency argument assumes that it’s really easy to kill a mammoth with Clovis technology. No matter how much meat was on the carcass it wouldn’t profit in the long run if half the hunting parted ended up gored, mashed into the ground, or picked up with the trunk and bashed against a tree every time they went out elephant hunting. About all he can say here is mammoths and mastodons didn’t have any other predators and therefore were not afraid of human hunters until it was too late; if the “elephant patches” were sufficiently separated other elephants also wouldn’t learn about humans.


Well, plausible, interesting but unproven. As a whole, though, the book is an excellent reference to what was known about Clovis as of the 2002 publication date and a good complement to the other books I’ve been reading. Extensive tables, graphs, maps, illustrations and photographs; heavily endnoted and with an extensive bibliography. Hayes’ writing style is, alas, pretty heavy; he hedges on almost every statement and sometimes I can’t tell if this is legitimate scientific caution or just being indecisive. The dates are always given as “rcybp” (radiocarbon years before present); this is again cautious since radiocarbon calibration to calendar dates is still underway and by giving the raw data future advances in calibration can be accommodated. Still, you have to remind yourself frequently that with the current calibration rcybp are about 2000 years earlier than calendar date.


Added later: Ongoing research has made the “ice free corridor” idea increasingly dubious; it lookslike the paradigm will switch to the Pacific coastal route.
… (altro)
½
 
Segnalato
setnahkt | Dec 21, 2017 |

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8
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85
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