Greece Books

This map was easy to read, gave us enough detail for driving to various locations throughout the country and was very practical. The only problem was when driving on the roads in Greece, none but the super-highways has any route markers. We drove for miles and miles on state highways and never once saw a route sign. You have to navigate by destinations toward a city or village. (So that's not a fault of the map.)

"The Course of true love did never run smoothe." Shakespeare's tale of four Athenian lovers and a fairy named Puck is a very funny play. I loved this story, it is a good love comedy that I would recomend to anyone who is a Shakespeare fan or a loves a good book. I would have to say that this book is for teens all the way to adults. Some of the content may not be OK for children

"A Midsummer Night's Dream" is one of Shakespeare's most charming and intelligent comedies. Exploring with humour the theme of star-crossed lovers that he deals with tragically in "Romeo and Juliet," Shakespeare here takes three troubled relationships and has them intersect in the most amusing ways.

The impending nuptials of Theseus and Hippolyta set the background for the play, and are certainly the most distant, both from the immediate action, and in terms of romantic possibility. Theirs is a cool, rational relationship, seemingly devoid of passion. The already-married Oberon and Titania, king and queen of fairies, provide another marital backdrop. Both seem to be jealous of the other's chosen distractions, which deprive them of each other's company. Finally, the main action of the play concerns the love affair between Lysander and Hermia. Hermia's father, Egeus, wants his daughter to marry Demetrius, and does not approve of Lysander at all. Helena, Hermia's friend, is smitten with Demetrius, and so, the conflicts begin.

Oberon initiates the action of the play, goading his mischievous aid-de-camp, Puck, to stir up trouble with a love-inducing flower amongst both the human lovers and the fairy queen Titania. Foible and folly ensue when Puck starts into his work. Throw in some common craftsmen from Athens who are trying to put together a simple play for Theseus's wedding, and you have all the ingredients for enchantment.

In "A Midsummer Night's Dream," Shakespeare not only delves into the intricacies of human relationships on a romantic level, but also at the social, class, and interpersonal levels. He even critiques/celebrates the habits of his late 16th century audiences to intriguing effect. If you are tired of tragedy or think Shakespeare too distant or foreboding, pick up "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and you will find a solidly funny and endearing read.

I found this to be an accurate and concise account of the political turmoils of Greece since independence. I was delighted to find a considerable amount of material on General Plastiras and others who foresaw a truly democratic Greek nation. The chronology in the beginning is quite helpful, and an added bonus is that this is a quick read.

The central problem in contemporary psychiatry is to understand and sort out the bewildering variety of ways in which we conceptualize the origins, nature, and treatment of mental illness. This book attempts to deal with that problem by exploring the thinking of Greek antiquity, a vital period in the history of psychiatry.

Even defining the scope of modern psychiatry is a formidable task. Yet without some sense of what psychiatry is, it is impossible to write anything about its history, let alone use the past to illuminate the psychiatry we know today. I shall explore this difficulty and sketch some previous attempts to define the connection between ancient and modern psychiatry before going on to discuss in detail the ancient precursors and analogues of contempory models of mental illness. With an examination of Homer, the tragedians, Plato, and Hippocrates I explore the nature and origins of the two fundamental polarities in psychiatry today: the intrapsycic vesus the social model of the origins and treatment of mental disturbance, and the medical vesus the psychological model. The application of all these models to the elucidation of one particular condition is presented in a case study of hysteria. I shall conclude with a consideration of the requirements for a synthesis of these divergent perspectives.
--- excerpt from book's Preface

Nanno Marinatos does an excellent job of examining the complex, controversial world of Minoan religion. When doing a research project about the development of Minoan goddesses from Pre-Palatial through Post-Palatial times, I found that no other source was as helpful as this book.

The new testament content comes from the ancient mediterranean, a time when and where there were tales of "miracles". It may surprise some bible believers but the time and culture in and around the new testament had stories of wonders and miraculous deeds done by other figures. This book is an introductory compilation to some of the more well known ones at the time. What is so good about this book is that it has compiled many tales of miracles from ancient times, and it would take a long time to look them all up on your own, but in this book many of them are documented all in one cover. Reading these will wake one up to the ideological context of the "miraculous" in the culture that the new testament stems from. This need not be taken as showing that the new testament miracles are simply tales of it's time though. Some go that way, some don't. I think it's somewhere in the middle. The new testament miracles are most plausibly real deeds done by Jesus (and some from the apostles), and these deeds were indeed spectacular, and as such they may have been remembered and/or written using some of the wonder worker tales of the day back then. This doesn't make the new test. miracles any less real, it just means that the reality behind the miracle events may not be exactly as presented- this does not deny or undervalue the true significance of the things done by Jesus and the apostles though. Anyhow, for those who want to wrestle with this a bit more, new testament scholar Craig Blomberg has a pretty good conservative treatment of this in his book, The Historical Reliability of The Gospels. (look for a new edition of this due out in Jan. 2008) Another work that provides miraculous tales of antiquity in relation to the new testament is Documents For The Study of The Gospels by David Cartlidge.

Greek village life has been disappearing rapidly over the past 30 years as the actual villagers have died off. But this study was made over 100 years ago, when villages were thriving with thousands of people, and the direct connections between their religious and cultural practices and their ancient ancestors as shown in this book make it an incredibly important and truly invaluable historical document.

If anyone wants to decide whether a given country is modern, he has to start with an examination of what he means by modernity. Faubion examines this question admirably in this challenging but peculiarly beautiful book, but his work is so complex and so insightful that anyone undertaking to review it should probably ... have his head examined.

Faubion is endowed with -- or has acquired -- a splendid vocaulary of great precision that serves him well in all the tenuously nuanced dimensions of the present-day Greek reality he explores here. His syntax is baroquely elaborate, almost theatrical (in a sense of excellent theatre) and some of his longer sentences are not fully comprehensible on the first go. But that is no problem because the reader can always have a second go at any given sentence and in the process learn how real writers with real ideas, like Faubion, go about their business.

This is a hermeneutics of contemporary Athens and, by extension, of modern Greece, which is to say that the author regards meaning as the mediator between experience and consciousness and therefore undertakes a search for analogues adequate to trace a movement from unmediated experience to the historical consciousness in the several realms of meaning into which it (hopefully) differentiates.

Superimposing on this hermeneutics a specifically literary turn, he adopts from Harold Bloom -- and uses as an analytic tool -- a figure called ... metalepsis, which may be the poetic face of what we tyro Hegelians call sublation.

When the author mentions his field experience among highly educated cosmopolites in Kolonaki, one thinks back with compassion on linguist an anthropologist friends suffering through field work in the wilds of West Africa or Borneo (life really isn't fair, is it?).

The book offers not only an exploration of the historical consciousness of some few Greeks, but also tests social and cultural theory (Weber, Schiller, Foucault) and critiques some widely held positions in the fields of sociology and anthropology. To use a well worn scheme, Faubion clearly favors considerations of strategy, process and practice over rule, structure and theory. He outlines the historically constructivist (as distinct from classicist or essentialist) Greek self-understanding as it comes forth from his associates who function as field informants. On this basis he discusses anecdotally the sunsettled relations between such aspects of modern life as economics and politics, tradition and modernity, among many others.

I would venture to say that most hermeneuts of the Ricoeur school may experience difficulty with the author's position on the relation between writers and the texts they produce, but even if he rejects textual autonomy he still offers valuable insights on some modern Greek writers and their position in society. His treatment of the whole question of sexual liberation and identity is also excellent.

About 25 years ago M I Finley championed in his _Ancient Economy_ the idea that the ancient Greeks' love of coins was a political phenomenon, a sign of "patriotism or advertisement with no far reaching importance." What Finley had in mind was something akin to modern communities where a "national currency and national essence" have become common. This book presents a series of scholarly papers which show new studies of the social and economic use of coins and money in the Greek world.

Kim begins with a paper in which he shows that coins were a symbol as well as a commodity. Other societies bordering the Greek world (especially the Phoenicians) did not develop coinage for a century after the Greeks. Trevett explores the relation-ship between coinage and democracy at Athens. Democracy could not have existed without coinage. Oliver raises the question of whether or not Macedonian political control have an effect on the Athenian ability to issue coins. Meadows asks a similar question concerning the eastern Hellenisitic world. Von Reden argues that in Ptolemaic Egypt, coinage became a crucial bond between the central and local rulers. Ashton writes about the effects of the output of coinage from Rhodes from 408 to 190 BC. Davies writes about how coinage transformed "the ways in which the assets of collectives, cults, and sanctuaries were held, regarded, and used." Shipton studies the relationship between the State and those who owned state-owned property. And Rowlandson studies the records of Egypt for the relationship between peasants and wealthy landlords.

It should be pointed out to the reader that this book is an attempt to bridge the gap between numismatists and scholars of ancient history. Ashton's paper is as dry as any economics paper can be. The book is concluded with 12 plates of 350 or so coins from the Hellenistic world.