The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War - Rilegato

Alexander, Caroline

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0670021121 ISBN 13: 9780670021123

Casa editrice: Viking Pr, 2009

Riassunto

The Iliad is still the greatest poem about war that our culture has ever produced. For a hundred generations, poets and thinkers in the West have pored over, retold and argued about the events described in this martial epic, even when direct knowledge of it was lost. Various empires have admired it as a book that in telling the story of the siege of Troy also extols the warrior ethic, and teaches the young how to die well.

Yet the figure at the heart of the epic, the consummate warrior Achilles, is a brooding, controversial hero. He is a fierce critic of those who have started this war and allowed it to drag on, consuming soldiers and civilians alike. Disconcertingly, The Iliad portrays war as a catastrophe that destroys cities, orphans children and wrecks whole societies.

Caroline Alexander's extraordinary book is not about any of the traditional concerns that have occupied classicists for centuries. It is simpler and more radical than that. In her words, 'This book is about what the Iliad is about; this book is about what the Iliad says of war.'

Su questo libro

Recensione:

"In her spectacular and constantly surprising new book, Caroline Alexander has taken the 'original' war book and turned it upside down, making it, as all wars are, an excruciating story of loss...The War that Killed Achilles is a triumph."
-Ken Burns

"This riveting tale of ancient wars, legendary warriors, and mythical gods is at once a great adventure story and a cautionary tale of the enduring perils of hubris and ego. Achilles' life and death are instructive lessons for all of us today."
-Tom Brokaw

"Spirited and provocative...a nobly bold even rousing venture...it would be hard to find a faster, livelier, more compact introduction to such a great range of recent Iliadic explorations."
-Steve Coates, The New York Times

"Penetrating...reflecting her own skills [Alexander] provides her own translation of an entire chapter...a real bonus for the reader, comparing favorably with Lattimore and Fagles."
-Boston Globe

L'autore:

Caroline Alexander is the author of seven books, including the best-selling The Endurance and The Bounty, and has written for the New Yorker, National Geographic Magazine and Granta. Born in Florida of English parents, Alexander has travelled extensively throughout the world and lived in Europe, Africa and the Caribbean. One of the inaugural class of women Rhodes scholars at Oxford, she subsequently took her doctorate in Classics at Columbia University, in New York, specialising in Homeric studies, and established the Department of Classics at the University of Malawi in East Africa. She now lives on a farm in New Hampshire in the United States.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Viking Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0670021121
• ISBN 13: 9780670021123
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 296