Review: The Ancient Tripod of Peace

My Review Summary: This is a fun read that will keep you turning pages and have you googling Shakespeare and  Greek history… It’s full of ancient secrets hidden in plain sight and the reader is left wondering how much is true and how much has been made up to serve the plot. It’s a fun kind of confusion, and it kept me eagerly reading until the end.

Read more at Review: The Ancient Tripod of Peace. 

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History at its most exciting

While I was in Peru, I got asked what I knew about the massive Maya discovery being made in the Petén region of Guatemala. What??

“Oh yes,” I was told. “It is so big and amazing that soon people will want to visit it instead of Machu Picchu.”

Really? How could I have missed that.

Read more at History at its most exciting.

(For more on my trip to Peru see What you don’t know …. has the power to amaze you and woman traveling alone.)

Outraged by the day-to-day fears endured by more than half of his fellow humans

Rescue workers the world over had come to know Olumiji as the tall, thin Nigerian man who showed up after earthquakes, mudslides and tsunamis to offer assistance, and who had an uncanny ability to find barely alive souls in the wreckage. He stayed out of their way and asked for nothing in return, so most wrote him off as a harmless oddball. Some speculated that he may have lost a loved one himself long ago in a natural disaster. In a way they were right.

Read more at Outraged by the day-to-day fears endured by more than half of his fellow humans.

z2: my 3 favorite excerpts

From z2:

There was lightness in Stan’s step as he helped unload the two trucks and made his way to the cave’s small entrance. “You first, Dr. Drexler,” Nelson said politely. Stan wasn’t even all the way in when he noticed mud tracks he was sure neither he nor his students had made. No, come on, he thought. Surely we did not have intruders last night of all times.

He looked around quickly. Everything else they had found over the last few days was completely undisturbed. Only the ornate box and its half disintegrated bit of cloth covering were completely gone, as if they had never existed.

You have got to be kidding, Stan muttered to himself. Locals? For christsakes, did one of my students tell somebody? Then he had a second thought. Was there any chance at all that any of the five students could read hieroglyphics from this region that well?

Because Dr. Stan Drexler of course could. He had studied nothing but for the last twelve years. And even though there was a fair amount of local variation and he had only gotten a quick glance at it, there are certain words that anyone who has ever loved archaeology knows, at least in the culture where they have expertise. “Treasure” is one of those words. Even higher on the list is any phrase that translates roughly as “the greatest treasure ever.”

Read this full excerpt and two more at z2: new synopsis and my 3 favorite excerpts.