Greece Books

This is the first Great Courses lecture series that I listened to, and I plan to listen to many more. The format essentially is seasoned, college professors (with very impressive biographies, Ivy Leagues degrees, teaching awards, very relevant other pursuits, etc) giving lectures with what is probably piped in applause at the beginning and the end. The lectures are 30 minutes each, two lectures to a disc. This course is 12 discs.

The quality, at least in this series, is excellent, lively, insightful. I never felt that the talk was pedantic, boring, or self-absorbed. To some degree it is a shame that there is all this knowledge locked up in our university professors, and the only people who have an opportunity to hear them are the students. This lecture series lets in the rest of us interested people.

There is also a DVD edition of the series where paintings, artifacts, etc, relevant to the topic are displayed which I wasn't able to take advantage of because I wanted to listen to the lectures while driving my car, though I would have liked to have seen the images. The DVD don't not play in a CD player, FYI.

The greatest of all Greek historians was the Athenian general Thucydides (455-400 B.C.E.). Thucydides' classic work, "History Of The Peloponnesian War", provides us with the historical framework for 5th century Greece, a golden age of intellectual achievement and creativity rarely equaled in human history. This history is by far the best account of the bitter war between Athens and Sparta as well as the only surviving contemporary record of the rise of the Athenian empire. Thucydides as a master storyteller does not just cover the battle scenes; he records the great political speeches of Pericles, leader of Athens, and Lysander leader of Sparta with great acumen. He is recognized as the first historian to actually go and get eyewitness accounts, visit battlefieilds and research documents and records. This work took him over 20 years and it shows!

The lessons he teaches about imperial over reaching and unreasonable peace settlements are prescient today as they were during his times. President Woodrow Wilson, read this book on his voyage across the Atlantic to the Versailles Peace Conference and vociferously fought the other Allies in making unreasonable demands of the Germans. Wilson learned the dangers that the world would be placed in by backing the Germans into a corner politically and economically from Thucydides book.

As a graduate student in philosophy and history, I heartily recommend this timeless classic to anyone who is interested in political philosophy, and history. I also recommend you read it with David Cartwright's "A Historical Commentary On Thucydides."

Oh my god this is a brilliant book. Fully illastrated and packed with a lot of information! It's a Classics Major's wet dream! Pluse it's got an underwater archaeology section!

I think this is the best travelling guide of Greece I've ever seen! The pictures are brilliant, they really bring out the atmesphere of Greece, i can almost smell the air of kos while watching the pictures.... the text is interesting and easy to read, keep up the good work!

I found this guide book to be very helpful in getting around Greece. I really appreciated that it came in time before my trip.

I'm a teacher who took students to Greece, and I used this book as a textbook for cultural, historical, and language studies prior to our trip. It is graphically pleasing (great photos as well as graphs and charts), it covers many different areas of interest about Greece, and all of us got a lot out of it. It really helped us understand what we were seeing and participating in when we went to Greece. I highly recommend it to anyone who is either traveling to Greece or teaching about it.

Going on a trip and wanted the book first so I could reveiw it.Loved the pictures--always good to have in case your camera fails

This text is an excellent introduction to the Greek and Roman civilizations. It is well illustrated with photographs, maps, drawings, and paintings. The main eras, events, places and personalities in the history of Greece and Rome are mentioned. This book is typical of the high quality of a National Geographic Society publication.

Clearly not intended for the merely casual reader, this volume presents eleven deadly-serious essays that apply modern analytical methods to issues and problems facing the Greek Nation and State, with a view toward indicating what seems to be working and what needs adjusting. The fields covered are politics, foreign relations, economics, sociology, and change in all of these areas. Some essays require a high level of competence in the methodology of the given area; others are more immediately accessible even to the informed layman. One discusses the contributions to nation building made by the Orthodox Church since the early 19th Century and points out some changes that might be made in the Church's relations with government and society at this point in history. Another speaks to Greek attitudes toward making a living and contributing to the common economic good (problems here). There is also an extremely intelligent feminist article that examines the glass ceiling phenomenon in the Greek setting, particularly in the labor force and politics. The writer, Nota Kyriazis, points out that de jure equality...does not automatically produce a real improvement in women's status because attitudes and behaviors tend to remain tied to tradition and resistant to change. As indicated, all these essays are serious and scholarly. Everyone who still has some hope for our collective human future and the Greek stake in such a future should read at least some of them. The quality of analysis and writing is consistent throughout -- uniformly high.

I bought this book for my 8 year old daughter who loves geography and facts. She loved this book, along with the other books like it, Japan for example. It gives a lot of detail about the country.