Why Homer Matters, Adam Nicolson
Why Homer Matters, Adam Nicolson
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Why Homer Matters

Author: Adam Nicolson

Narrator: John Lee

Unabridged: 9 hr 46 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 03/17/2015


Synopsis

Adam Nicolson sees the Iliad and the Odyssey as the foundation myths of Greek—and our—consciousness, collapsing the passage of 4,000 years and making the distant past of the Mediterranean world as immediate to us as the events of our own time.

Homer's poems occupy, as Adam Nicolson writes "a third space" in the way we relate to the past: not as memory, which lasts no more than three generations, nor as the objective accounts of history, but as epic, invented after memory but before history, poetry which aims "to bind the wounds that time inflicts."

The Homeric poems are among the oldest stories we have, drawing on deep roots in the Eurasian steppes beyond the Black Sea?. These poems, which ask the eternal questions about the individual and the community, honor and service, love and war, tell us how we became who we are.

About Adam Nicolson

Adam Nicolson is the author of Sea Room: An Island Life in the Hebrides; Seize the Fire: Heroism, Duty, and Nelson's Battle of Trafalgar; and the bestselling New York Times Notable Book God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible. He has won the Somerset Maugham Award and the William Heinemann Award, and he lives with his family at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, England.


Reviews

Goodreads review by James on October 11, 2015

This is one of the most useful complements to a reading of Homer I know of. Adam Nicolson's knowledge of Homer's great works and his understanding of the Homeric world seem truly deep. Along with the important literary analysis The Mighty Dead is dense with historial fact and perspecctive concerning......more

Goodreads review by Eddie on January 19, 2023

Title should have been "Why Homer Matters . . . To Me". Nicolson is a skilled prose writer and the book is drenched in his personal love and responses to the Homeric epics. I enjoyed reading it, but others may find it self-indulgent. He's done a lot of research and works hard to present it in a vivid......more

Goodreads review by Rex on December 23, 2014

There was some interesting materials in here about Homeric traditions and what you currently in the places that are supposed to the locations of the legends, but the good stuff was drowned out by drone an author who seemed to be in love with the sound of his own voice.......more