Greece Books

"This tiny candlelit dining room has no menu - instead, choose from raw ingredients brought directly to your table then cooked to order. Offerings change daily, but the heavenly results - succulent lobster with spicy Parmesan sauce, Chinese noodles with smoked fish in a saffron-mastic infusion - have made it a perennial favorite. Service is impeccably personal and the check arrives in an antique music box."

Of all the guides I've seen for Athens, this one has some very unique and cozy recommendations for restaurants. If you are going to Athens as much for the food as the architecture, this guide will gives you "the draw," "the scene," and a "hot tip" for each restaurant. Reading through the downtown attractions, you feel you are truly there because the descriptions are so detailed.

The main sections include information on art spaces, beaches, seasonal highlights, cafes, candlelit bars, classic dining, hotels, places by the sea, clubs, rooms with views, shows under the stars and tables with a view. Four sections about the Athens Experience presents opportunity for either a Classic Athens tour, Hot-and-Cool Itinerary, Downtown Athens visit, By-the-Water Athens escape.

Delphi, Napflion, Olympia, Thessaloniki and the Wineries of Attica are also featured. The Ilands: Hydra, Mykonos, Rhodes, Santorini and Skiathos are briefly discussed and given a few pages each.

This book contains some of the best food/travel writing I've seen in a long time. The Fun Seeker's Athens is worth buying for the writing style and cozy suggestions! Reading this guide will make you wonder why you are still at home! They make Athens sound like the place to be, so romantic.

~The Rebecca Review

Where to find this? Would you read it if you could?

Hanson is like all the greats though - he could make dust mites seem like an epic encounter.

Read this man. You won't be sorry.

This study of gambling and everyday life in Chania, Crete, is an outstanding example of how anthropological ethnography can contribute to larger debates in the social sciences while remaining accessible and engaging to the casual reader. The author's intellectual objective is to shed light on reigning theories of risk and indeterminacy by exploring in finely grained detail how risk is operative and is experienced, interpreted and strategized against/upon by social actors in real life. The setting of the study is ideal for this purpose, as social life in this town is organized for many around the playing, practice and performance of gambling. A range of useful and non-jargony conceptual tools for capturing the experience of uncertainty are introduced (performative indeterminacy, instrumental nonchalance, e.g.), which heighten the feeling that true insight is occurring here. In fact, it is one of the impressive achievements of this book, that it manages to engage the serious scholar in ongoing disciplinary debates (about risk theory, social poetics, modernity and the state) while remaining a perfectly charming read for the nonspecialist.

Impressively enhanced with 609 color and 40 b/w illustrations, along with 10 maps and 3 foldouts, Games And Sanctuaries In Ancient Greece: Olympia, Delphi, Isthmia, Nemea, Athens by Panos Valavanis (Associate Professor of Archaeology, University of Athens) is an informed and informative 448 page, "coffee table book" compendium showcasing the history of the Hellenic games, the athletes, the sanctuaries, the cities, and the legacy of the ancient Greeks who some 2,500 years ago created the enduring traditions of the Olympic games that continues down to this very day. Games And Sanctuaries In Ancient Greece is a superbly presented history of the origins of the Greek games and traces the development of athletic competitions in Greece from their first mention in the fables of the Illiad and other literary sources down through the late antique period of Hellenic history. A work of inspired scholarship, Games And Sanctuaries In Ancient Greece is very highly recommended reading for anyone with an interest in the Olympic Games, and would make an enduring popular and suitable selection for an academic or community library "Memorial Fund" acquisition.

A lot of people find Greek and Latin literature boring l. If they refer to their school books I cannot blame them. But lets keep in mind that Sappho wrote poetry 'as refreshing as a morning breeze' and that Euripides sometimes wrote horror as if he was an early incarnation of Stephen King.Homer is often humorous for instance when he describes Zeus who's afraid that his wife Hera will be mad at him if he should change the course of the Trojan war. In 'A garden of Greek verse' are poems and excerpts of poems from about sixteen authors, a lot of it no more than two or three lines. To name a few of less known authors: Anacreon, Alcman, Callimachus, Menander, Palladas. 'A Garden of Greek Verse' proofs to us that Greek literature is a very interesting place to travel with a large variety of landscapes. I should say: read this little book of 80 pages, enjoy the beautiful illustrations and forget all about your school books

Detienne's book is a wonderfull and thought provoking book.
he presents a structuralist analysis of the myth of Adonis.
It is very hard to provide convincing structuralist interpretations to myths and it seems that in structuralism
the journey is at least as important as the end result
(see most of the work of Levi Strauss). However, in this case Detienne's analysis is rather compeling and provides the reader with amazing insights into greek thought about food, perfumes,
sex and all the other good things in life. If you wish to read just one structuralist work to get a feeling for this
fascinating and highly non trivial mode of analysis of human thought, I would recommend this book

I thought that is book was wonderful! I just wanted to look at it to get the Greek alphabet and how to spell some Greek words, but the content was so interesting that it had me through the first 21 pages in 20 minutes! The details are wonderful! If you have ever wondered about the small things in ancient Greeks lives this is the book to look at. It has everything!

I read this book as an undergraduate at Berkeley. The book really opened my mind and affected me deeply. A large part of our civilization is based upon Greek philosophy, and we generally idolize them as intellectual heroes. But Slater's work investigates how the Greek family structure, with its extremely repressed women, affected Greek male psychology, and how this is reflected in their mythic structure. Slater's revelations made me re-think the whole Western investment in the Greek ethos.

This book is a revised and expanded editon of a 1985 book The Platonic Cosmology by the same author. As explained on p.ix of the preface to the 2005 edition, the author attempts to "place Plato's cosmological commitments in the Timaeus, Statesman, and Philebus into a wider metaphysical context." A sequence of highly imformative essays allows the author to provide the reader with a thorough understanding of Plato's physics, psychology, epistemology, and theology. Unlike many Anglo-American critics of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, who chose to ignore the important aspects of late Platonism, the author takles issues relating to Time and Eternity, Space and Phenomenal World, Reason and God. The nature and characteristics of Plato's Craftsman God (Timaeus 28a6,29a3,41a7, 42e8, 62e2, 69c3; Philebus 27b1) or Maker (Timaeus 28c3; Philebus 27a5)are discussed and explained not through the lens of Aristotle's Physics II or Metaphysics XII but to put it in layman's terms, as Plato would have explained it, if he were alive today. A well-documented and thoughtfully written book indeed!!!

In this work, Lloyd Gerson in his capacity as a profound philosopher provides us with a coherent and committed interpretation of ancient Greek philosophy from the Pre-Socratics to Plotinus. Behind the surface of a labyrinth of concepts and systems strange to the eyes of modern people, Gerson pinpoints the central concern of the whole tradition as an attempt to find the ultimate cause and principle of explanation for every possible phenomena we may encounter. Gerson's interpretation is not only insightful but also sufficiently supported by textual and historical evidence. This book is highly recommended for those interested in ancient and medieval philosophy