14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Intro to Greek Tragedy, Without Being Overwhelming, January 11, 2007
This review is from: Greek Tragedy (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)
I wanted to buy a book containing a representative sample of the three extant ancient Greek tragedians (Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripedes) as a gift. It was either this one or the Bantam collection edited by Moses Hadas - a mass market edition. I'd read the Bantam one, and it contains a number of the plays by each, plus an Aristophenes comedy, in a perhaps slightly stiff translation. It was actually tough to ascertain the contents of this Penguin book, as no shop seemed to have it, and there was no "look inside" feature for it on Amazon, so I went ahead and bought it. I'm not disappointed.
It contains less plays than the Bantam: Just Aeschylus' Agamemnon, Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and Euripedes' Medea. It also has a nice intro about Greek Tragedy, and selections from Aristotle's Poetics. Having fewer plays than the Bantam, it feels a lot less crammed. I was pleased by the selection, as I personally think they're the single best play of each playwright. Decent translations.
So...if you're looking for something to serve as a nice sampling of Greek Traj, perhaps for someone new to the genre, without running the risk of overwhelming, it's a good choice.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Kindle edition is a frustrating reading experience, January 13, 2012
This review focuses on the Kindle reading experience of this e-book, rather than on the literary merits of the e-book.
In a word, the Kindle experience is dreadful. Don't waste your money on this e-book.
The poor (non-existent?) post-scan editing of the e-book means it has plenty of errors. This criticism is equally true of every other low-priced e-book I have bought from Amazon.
More importantly, none of the numerous end notes can be immediately accessed in the same one-click way you can look up the meaning of a word using the Kindle dictionary.
To get to any desired end note, the reader has to use the Kindle's clunky, frustrating "Go To Location" functionality in a laborious trial and error process. Kindle "locations" have no obvious relation to actual pages, which makes the search process even more frustrating.
But why get so worked up about end notes? Why not just ignore them?
Unfortunately you can't just ignore the end notes if you want to appreciate all the nuances of the plays in this e-book. The plays are full of topical references to Greek gods, to notable figures of the time and to current affairs - all of which would be well known to contemporary audiences. Without that knowledge the modern reader simply cannot appreciate much of the worth of these tragedies.
Most readers of ancient classics are not just casual readers. They have a different motivation and will certainly want to access end notes to help them get as much out of the text as they can.
The end notes are invaluable in providing all the needed explanatory background to appreciate the jokes and allusions. And there are hundreds of end notes, so it is obvious how important they are.
Exactly the same criticism can be made of any other e-book with end notes - or of any e-book where the reader wants to refer frequently and quickly to different parts of the e-book to consult maps, diagrams, tables and the like.
Kindles are great for reading slabs of text from beginning to end, but frustratingly hopeless for reading books where you want to refer frequently to different parts of a book.
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