Homer's the Iliad and the Odyssey A Biography
No one knows if there was a man named Homer, but there is no little doubt that the epic poems assembled under his name form the cornerstone of Western literature. The Iliad and The Odyssey, with their incomparable tales of the Trojan War, brace Achilles, Ulysses and Penelope, the Cyclops, the beautiful Helen of Troy, and the petulant gods, are familiar to most readers because they are so pervasive. They have fed our imagination for over two and a half millennia, inspiring everyone from Plato to Virgil, Pope to Joyce, Dante to Wolfgang Petersen. In this graceful and sweeping addition to the Books that Change the World Series, Alberto Manguel traces the lineage of the epic poems. He considers their original purpose, either as allegory or record of history, surveys the challenges the pagan poems presented to the early Christian world, and traces their spread after the Reformation. Following Homer through the greatest literature ever created, Manguel's book above all delights in the poems themselves, the "primordial spring without which there would have been no culture."
FictionFairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & MythologyLiterary CriticismAncient & ClassicalPoetry
RELEASED2007
PUBLISHERAtlantic Monthly Press
LENGTH285
LANGUAGEEN
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A Canadian Argentine-born writer, translator, and editor. **The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel** *Reviewed by Peter Ackroyd, The Times May 8, 2008* There is an old superstition that books, alone in the night and the silence, whisper one to another; the library then becomes an echo chamber of words and syllables, conjuring up the great general drama of the human spirit. Libraries are legendary places. Libraries enter myth as well as history. Lost libraries, like that of Alexandria, are a reminder of the transience of human achievement and of human learning. “No place,” Samuel Jonson said, “affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.” [Read the whole review][1] (PDF) [1]: http://www.atelieraldente.de/manguel_0h4/documents/Ackroyd%20The%20Library%20at%20Night.pdf
Homer's the Iliad and the Odyssey A Biography
No one knows if there was a man named Homer, but there is no little doubt that the epic poems assembled under his name form the cornerstone of Western literature. The Iliad and The Odyssey, with their incomparable tales of the Trojan War, brace Achilles, Ulysses and Penelope, the Cyclops, the beautiful Helen of Troy, and the petulant gods, are familiar to most readers because they are so pervasive. They have fed our imagination for over two and a half millennia, inspiring everyone from Plato to Virgil, Pope to Joyce, Dante to Wolfgang Petersen. In this graceful and sweeping addition to the Books that Change the World Series, Alberto Manguel traces the lineage of the epic poems. He considers their original purpose, either as allegory or record of history, surveys the challenges the pagan poems presented to the early Christian world, and traces their spread after the Reformation. Following Homer through the greatest literature ever created, Manguel's book above all delights in the poems themselves, the "primordial spring without which there would have been no culture."
FictionFairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & MythologyLiterary CriticismAncient & ClassicalPoetry
RELEASED2007
PUBLISHERAtlantic Monthly Press
LENGTH285
LANGUAGEEN
A Canadian Argentine-born writer, translator, and editor. **The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel** *Reviewed by Peter Ackroyd, The Times May 8, 2008* There is an old superstition that books, alone in the night and the silence, whisper one to another; the library then becomes an echo chamber of words and syllables, conjuring up the great general drama of the human spirit. Libraries are legendary places. Libraries enter myth as well as history. Lost libraries, like that of Alexandria, are a reminder of the transience of human achievement and of human learning. “No place,” Samuel Jonson said, “affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.” [Read the whole review][1] (PDF) [1]: http://www.atelieraldente.de/manguel_0h4/documents/Ackroyd%20The%20Library%20at%20Night.pdf
