Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10353 in Books
• Published on: 1991-11-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 784 pages

Synopsis
This edition contains "The Greek Myths" volumes one and two.

Customer Reviews

Fantastic
I read this book in two sittings. The first while waiting in a hotel reception for my friend Darren. He was fairly late but I had plenty of time to kill. One of the bots at reception, a tall greek from Corfu, saw me waiting and handed me the book, "I have committed it all to memory", "you can keep it" he vocoded. I sat down and read a few chapters before I started to think I'd told Darren the wrong moon. He must have gone to Europa. I couldn't wait another hour for contact with Europa, and had been told by Darren not to use the telecom relay networks around Jupiter. I stopped reading and caught the Ganymede/Europa bus from outside the hotel. After about ten minutes of listening entertained to the bus' weird babble of tongues, I got a call from Darren, he said he'd contracted Liver Flees while sightseeing on Jupiter's rocky core and was currently resting at the health centre on Europa. His voice was strangely restrained, I wasn't sure whether he was joking, though I remembered from a Jessop Attenborough programme, that Liver Flees need hydrogen to survive, and since the last of Jupiter's hydrogen had been tapped 130 years ago, i figured he was just protecting his cover, maybe the space masons were with him.

Sat next to me on the bus, was a mother and child of a familiar Mandarin-speaking alien race - The Squit. These clothe-less people are descendants of what on earth we call `birds', The mother had what looked like bird feathers for hair and the child was young enough to still have the fingers of one arm attached the wing, the other arm was free and flailing. The mother was very attractive but the child was annoying. It was telling me story after story, all of which ending in "and I didn't even cry". I tried to think of something to say to end the onslaught yet still maintain my chances with the mother. In desperation I asked the mother "what's your favourite seed". I really wish I hadn't. She seized the opportunity to recite a litany of edible seeds from far and wide. Stumbling to think of a top top favourite seed, she looked up at the ceiling in thought. This gave me time to catch sight of her flange and busters, the joyous vision of overpowering my torment. Before I could completed SWOT analysis, she looked at me and carried on with her jabbering fusillade of seed talk. In total awe I looked back up at her beautiful beak, clasped it shut and kissed her on her beady black eye.

A remarkable reference book
This book is remarkable for many reasons. It covers the entire cannon of greek myths and legends in a refreshing and illuminating way. Graves cross-indexes the entire book with a kind of "internet-link hypertext" (this book was written WAY before the WWW) that can lead to surprising connections. And yes, he does present his ingenious "key" to understanding the "true" meanings "hidden" behind these stories, but he had the decency to separate these from the more generally accepted "University course" interpretations. And, as even critical reviewers have pointed out, even if you disagree with what he has to say, he was an extremely well read and scholarly man with an astonishing knack for rendering the past vivid and meaningful. His opinions are always thought provoking and worth reading...

The myths are great but the commentary is horrible
This is a fine scholarly work collecting together all the Greek myths from various sources (Hesiod, Homer, Apollodorus, Pindar, etc.) and retelling them in a highly accessible manner. However, for every page of Greek myth there are two pages of Graves's commentary and here is where the problem lies. It's all sacred queen and sacrificial king nonsense, the sort of prehistoric fantasy that he went on about at tedious length in the 'White Goddess'. Lacking documentary evidence, he feels free to impose whatever fantasy he likes on prehistoric European society and, at heart, Graves was nothing more than a new-age mystic. Nonetheless, buried among the dross there is real scholarship which makes you feel that you should read the commentary in case you miss something genuinely illuminating. It does make it damned hard going, though.