Greece Books

This pleasurable book fills a need by representing the Cynics in one affordable volume. The essays are diverse in the topics and time periods addressed, from Greece to Goethe and beyond. View the table of contents to preview the extravaganza. On the whole, the essays are clear and compelling reading for all interested in how different people have received some ideas of the Cynics. Be sure to note the academic fireworks in the footnotes for the most polite disagreements among contributors.

Garland does an outstanding job of presenting a readable, easily understandable overview of daily life and culture among the ancient Greeks. His book destroys a number of myths about ancient Greece, and avoids the trap of becoming too closely engaged with the subject. He remains objective throughout, presenting neither positive nor negative spin on Greek lifestyle, and avoiding political bias. Garland clearly has no axe to grind. Furthermore, he presents the material in a way that modern readers can understand; he places the subject matter in the context of the times, but does not assume detailed knowledge of Greek culture or history by the reader. His writing is a bit dry at times, but that's unavoidable when presenting detailed descriptions of lifestyle and culture.

I do wish the publisher would release another print run at a more reasonable price. $55 is unreasonable for any book. I suggest buying it used.

In spite of the high price, I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the way the ancient Greeks thought and acted. It has definitely improved my understanding of Greek history.

This book brought fond memories back for me. I related to a lot of this author's experiences during her time in Greece as an American living abroad. Being an American myself and also having resided in Chios, Greece, Ms. Simonsen captured the true essence of the trials, tribulations & excitement of living in an extremely different culture...

Michael Pearce's latest comedy of manners mystery reads as if he is channeling Compton Mackenzie's entertaining spy mysteries set in the Med during WWI. Recommended for anyone who enjoys learning some history while being enterained

This book is an excellent reference to the Inner Mani (Mesa Mani). (If you are looking for the Outer Mani (Messinian Mani), it doesn't say much.)

It has a few picture sections that hit the highlights of the area, and even just browsing the pictures will make anyone with the slightest sense of curiousity want to spend time there.

It is as well written as Patrick L. Fermor's "Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese" but a *LOT* more up to date. (It covers the area in about 1980, and still matches well with what I saw last year). [The Mani of Patrick Fermor has passed away with the comming of the road into the area, this book covers it as it has become]

This book is a "Must Read" for anyone that is planning to visit the Mani. This book included places of interest there that I was unaware of after several trips.

This book is another of the series like the Museum of Athens.
Delphi has been the place of the famous oracle the Pythia,were Greeks and people of all standards of life came and asked questions relating to all kind of subject to this oracle.
This is the museum that has the artifacts that have survived time.The Charioteer is the most outstanding statue that I have seen in my life.
The book has the map and all the detailed sections of the old temple.
I have been to Delphi,there are a lot of secions that have survived.However the details that you see in this book you may not be able to see,if you are not an archeologist.

The reason I had purchased this book was to attempt to get into the mind of the contemporary average Greek citizen (Specifically Athens) and to see how they thought, what their intellectual capacities were, and exactly what their capabilities were in the overall political process. I wanted to know if the titantic proportions of apathy that permeates the "democracies" of the world today existed at that time as well. If not, then what created this apathy, and what would be the appropriate pathway that would lead to the implementation of integrity into the political system? The book satisfied my curiousity, and I now have a much better understanding of the contemporary Athenian politica process. I must say, however, that I do not agree with the author's solution.

Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy is truly remarkable scholarship, illuminating, philosophically inspiring and highly recommended.

Bobzien traces the Stoic theory of causal determinism to its beginnings and discusses its connection with their views on freedom, action, and moral responsibility. The book is, however, more than a book on the history of philosophy; it is a book on philosophy and is, indeeed, philosophically rewarding.

This book is highly recommended not just for those intereseted in Stoicism, Hellenistic philosophy or Ancient philosophy generally, but also for anyone interested in contemporary debates about determinism and questions about free will.

Jullien is a rare scholar. He has succeeded in presenting things Chinese to be interesting in a way that Western sensibility can (finally) understand. Equipped with vast erudition in both traditions, Jullien sets out to question for the Western mind the significance, ramifications, and benefit of going about doing and saying things in an oblique way.

He traces the canonical texts --Lao tse's Taotejing, Lun Yu, Zhuangtse, etc-- in which this sort of sensibility and praxis took on literary form. But as the topic is not a matter of philology but sensibility, he also draws large examples of the oblique as practiced in modern China under Mao.

The author writes that he was drawn initially to Chinese studies because, for him, China represented the ultimate Other--not as theory, not as deconstruction, not as rhetoric, but as STRUCTURE. His aim in this study undertaken here is to understand the Chinese way of getting a loose grip on things so as to better "control" them -- which in "Chinese" terms would mean, letting 'them' come naturally, ineluctably into the field of one's (secret) intentions, rather than forcing them to obey one's will.

Jullien points out the difficulty involved in grasping this "Chinese" phenomenon lies in the very way in which the Western languages operate. The West's habit is to tackle whatever straight on. Arguments lead to counter-arguments, and the whole agonistic process is hinged on both sides keeping a tight grip of the objective involved in the argumentation. Gong-ans (Koans) from Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism will give you some idea of asking/answering in manner that is utterly different from the Western.

Jullien shows how the tradition of logical argumentation in the West is directly related to that of warfare, and the rise of democracy among the Greek city-states. And he contrasts this history with the Chinese "art" of war by which an adversarial situation, for example, can be obliquely manipulated to bring the adversary to a condition not of DESTRUCTION but of DESTRUCTURATION. And so on.

He makes comparisons with ancient Greece for specific reasons to clarify what he is trying to show, which is something that flies outside the normal range of the Western sensibility/mind's radar. However, he is too sophisticated to go for that naively academic comparison that can only lead to the obvious after several hundred unnecessary pages of belabored indexing: Namely, 'A' is similar to 'B' in these many banal ways but different in those ways.
No, Jullien wants to keep his distance so that he may observe and describe that which moves without a clear, calculable vector. His aim is to secure and illuminate that which makes for 'originality,' which for him is another name for none other than 'culture.'
By using China as the living model of the Other, he manages to shed light on what in the West remains exceedingly difficult to see for the Westerner. His aim therfore, ultimately, is to create the space necessary for him and the Western reader to see what is truly unfamiliar about the West itself.
Refreshing and penetrating. Highly recommended as required reading to all who wish to go beyond the shallow media-hype about globalization and understand what really is necessary for a planetary understanding of humanity's intellectual diversity.

Another gem from the Dalkey publishing house, this exploration of creativity reads beautifully. For the most part, it succeeds both as literary experiment and as narrative. Author James Merrill is a poet, and his imagery and poetic structure are the major attraction of this "book within a book."

Merrill's protagonist, Sandy, struggles with a novel he's writing about his family and their experiences on the Greek island of "Diblos." Merrill's conceit is that his (Merrill's) book is really the notebook of author "Sandy." There are two types of entries in this notebook: Sandy's draft of a novel, complete with edits, restarts, notes to himself, etc., and Sandy's journal about his "real life" and people and experiences from which he derives much of his novel.

I won't be giving away too much by providing a brief key to the names of characters in Sandy's novel and their counterparts Sandy's life. "Orestes" is the draft novel 's name for Orson, Sandy's half-brother. "Dora" (the older woman unnamed at the start of Sandy's novel), Orestes' friend and lover, is based on Dora, friend and lover of Orson on Diblos who later accompanies him to New York City. "Sandy" remains unnamed in the novel, but is Orestes' half-brother. "Arthur Orson" is Orson's godfather; his place in the novel is not yet resolved.

"The (Diblos) Notebook" is not as confusing as it may sound, and the writing is evocative and beautifully impressionistic: "The islands of Greece Across vivid water the islands of Greece lie. They have been cut out of cardboard and set on bases of at subtle odds with one another, upon bases of pale haze. Their colors are mauve, exhausted blue, tanned rose, here and there crinkled to catch the light. They do not seem It is inconceivable that they are of one substance with the warm red rock underfoot"

These fits and starts are especially prevalent in the beginning of Merrill's book, and (as he notes in his 1994 afterword) are his attempt to show that, contrary to the notions of some Beat writers, the first creative impulse is not always the best. Sometimes revision improves writing. What I found just as interesting, though, were the sentences in which the original sounded truer, as if the revisions were trying to hide certain emotions. The editing device, with the fragments that resemble poetry and the hints at repression get somewhat tiring after awhile, and Merrill focuses more on straightforward narrative in the well-paced second half. His presentations of brilliant, vain Orson, insightful but isolated Sandy, and the contrasts between Greece and New York read easily and are as insightful as the more overtly psychological revisions. It's an interesting book, rich with such pleasures. At times the book is challenging, and Merrill perhaps overplays his "experiment," but it's also one of those books that reveals more pleasures with each rereading (whether of the whole book or just sections). This book was well received by the critics; it was a final nominee for the National Book Award in Fiction in 1965. Definitely recommended.