Nonfiction
In the Valley of the Kings: Howard Carter and the Mystery of King Tutankhamun’s Tomb, by Daniel Meyerson, $26
At the moment in 1922 when Howard Carter uncovered the mummy of King Tut, he catapulted both parties from obscurity to fame. In the slim new book “In the Valley of the Kings,” Daniel Meyerson places that moment in the context of biography, archaeology, Egyptology and mythology.
Tutankhamun was the son of a sun-worshipping mad monotheist who abolished the national religion and built his own capital city and burial complex in the mid-1300s B.C.
The father’s death threw the country into religious and political turmoil (Tut himself died young, perhaps in a hunting accident). Ironically, Egypt was in a similar state just 100 years ago, as a native political awakening began to undercut French influence, British domination and Ottoman rule.
At the same time, brilliant (and occasionally unscrupulous and sticky-fingered) archaeologists scrambled for wealthy patrons as they panned for the gold of a civilization buried beneath the sand.
Carter, a low-born, little-educated, lonely and slightly crazed British artist who became one of the greatest Egyptologists of his day, is a compelling central character, and his eccentric mentor, William Flinders Petrie, also commands attention.
Carter found the greatest treasure under the desert, but never found peace: Tut’s true curse was to be so well hidden that only an eternally dissatisfied man would have the patience to discover his tomb.
Meyerson brings to life the excitement of that hunt.
By Ian Shapira
Washington Post Writers Group
Nonfiction
A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination, by Clay Risen, $25.95
On April 5, 1968, the day after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, President Lyndon Johnson watched as smoke shrouded the nation’s capital. Mobs, looters and arsonists were blanketing downtown Washington. They had Molotov cocktails; the police had gas canisters. Johnson had to make a decision fast: Should he order troops to quell the riots?
In “A Nation on Fire,” journalist Clay Risen recounts the tense conditions in several cities in the days after King’s death. In Washington, Johnson decided to send troops in, but only after a near debacle.
First, the president deployed Warren Christopher, his deputy attorney general, and two other top officials, into the riot zone in an unmarked police car to give a recommendation. But they couldn’t reach Johnson via police radio.
So in the heart of the craziness, Christopher waited at a pay phone for what “must have felt like an hour,” Risen reports. “Where have you been?!” Johnson yelled when they finally connected; shortly thereafter, Risen writes, “Johnson cut him off. Fine, he said. We’ll send in troops.”
Anecdotes like this one keep Risen’s account of the 10 days before and after the King assassination moving fast. Still, despite Risen’s use of newly declassified documents, much of the interesting material comes from coverage by The Washington Post that was compiled in the book “Ten Blocks From the White House.”
Nonetheless, Risen’s city-by-city reconstruction of the riots, tucked into his larger analysis about the civil rights era, offers a useful evocation of those times.
