Product Description

Anthony O'Hear presents a personal tour of the most impressive, influential and era-defining books mankind has ever produced."Paradise Lost", "The Canterbury Tales", "Dom Quixote": great literature can be read by anyone, with a little help. Anthony O'Hear leads the way with this captivating journey through two-and-a-half millennia of books as dark, powerful, erotic, thrilling, politically astute and awe-inspiring as any modern bestseller.We begin with Homer, whose poems of epic struggle have made him the father of Western literature. After "Greek Tragedy", Plato, and Virgil's "Aeneid" comes "Ovid", whose encyclopaedic Metamorphoses is an inexhaustible source for European art and literature.Via St Augustine we reach Dante, the author of "The Divine Comedy", a sublime, terrifying tour through Hell, Purgatory and an ecstatic vision of Paradise. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Milton, Pascal, Racine and finally Goethe complete the cast list. In each case O'Hear patiently draws out themes, focuses on key passages and explains why they are important.Personal, passionate, painstakingly researched and beautifully illustrated, this is a grand work of reference. But it is also a narrative history shot through with a love of literature, and a deeply-held belief in its power to shape everyone's world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #67553 in Books
• Published on: 2008-08-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

Review
"'This is the best Introduction to the classics of western literature that I have ever read. It will be invaluable for all, and should be required reading in sixth forms across the country.' Chris Woodhead, former chief inspector of schools 'O'Hear's range is extraordinarily wide and he has a rare ability to explain complex ideas in a straightforward fashion.' Sunday Telegraph 'Impassioned and impressive' John Gray, Independent 'Salty and addictive' Daily Telegraph 'Fascinating' Alain de Botton, Observer"

About the Author
Anthony O'Hear is Weston Professor of Philosophy at the University of Buckingham, Director of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, and Editor of the journal Philosophy. His journalism has featured notably in the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the Express, and he is often on Radio 4's Today programme and Radio 3's Night Waves.

Customer Reviews

Slapdash, boring, confusing, and bland
O'Hear attempts to retell some of the great classics for the modern reader, who may not have encountered them in today's education system. For such a task you need the story telling power of Charles Dickens combined with the wit and judgement of Dr Johnson. Unfortunately O'Hear has neither of these attributes. He certainly has courage to attempt such a thing, but he is blind to his limitations and the needs of the modern reader.

I have just finished re-reading Homer's Odyssey in a superb version by the Rieu's (father and son) in Penguin. They found a way to bring Homer to the masses with their transparent translation and straightforward prose. The reader would be far better served by going straight to this rather than by reading O'Hear's boring, bland and perplexing overview.

O'Hare's great originals simply over-power him. The walls of Troy, circles of Hell, roads to Canterbury are jumbled and bound together by the blandest of summaries. Promoters of literature must show why and how they love their favourite. To do this must be able to write almost as well as them. O'Hear cannot.

He uses badly chosen translations. A book like this should choose translators for whom teaching is a priority, and who speak to readers in their own language. To use Pope's Homer (not Rieu's or Lombardo's) and Dryden's Virgil (not Lombardo's) is to make things unnecessarily difficult for the general reader. Pope is now almost as unintelligible as the original. The editor should have asked O'Hear some very hard questions. Why not use Ted Hughes's wonderful versions of Ovid instead of an unknown Elizabethan? Why not use Pinsky's translation of the Iliad, or Grossman's translation of Don Quixote? O'Hare even quotes Chaucer in Old English, a foreign language to non-specialists; Penguin produce a superb modern English translation.

In summary, this is an unevenly potted version of a few dozen giant works of European literature. You have to praise the highlighting of these works, but condemn the slapdash summarising of them. It smacks of something put together by a philosopher on holiday. Indeed, it was written on the back of a hurriedly put together course in Portugal. The reader should take the list of works O'Hear "approaches" and read them directly in good modern translations. That way they might begin to love them. Read O'Hear and they can only be left feeling bored and confused, which would be incredibly sad.

a helping hand
This book is not meant as a substitute for reading the classics, rather it is for those who want a companion text for a journey through Western literature. It is worth buying merely for the courage it gives one to read these books, and the synopses provided are invaluable. In a society where the great thinkers of the past are neglected in school in favour of modern illiterati, it is refreshing to read the work of a man who relishes every word.

Classics in an abridged form
I would recommend this work if only for its skilled abridgement of some of the leading stories in cultural literature. As it is I would also recommend it both as a reminder to those who have read these great books,or to those who might find the idea of the originals daunting and be happily surprised at the result instead.