Customer Reviews

By Jove! Brush Up Your Mythology

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you are looking for a quick review or a quick look into Mythology, this is the perfect book for you. It gives quick, concise accounts of mythology, from the beginning, Chaos which was the source of the first proper beings, to Pandora's box, the Muses, and Pegasus. This book helped my out so much better than any textbook that I've read. It's a wonderful reference book that every bookshelf should have!

Not being familiar with Michael MacRone's(the author) work, I thought that this book would be your basic book of the ancient tales that the Romans would have spun. However, when I flipped through the pages of this book upon its arrival, I was sorely mistaken. This book does not have to do so much with the stories surrounding Zeus and the other Roman deities, but how ther culture has influence ours and the sayings and words derived from their language.
If you look from it as a purely fun read though, it is filled with interesting facts but often it leaves you with more questions; Michael MacRone spends too much time trying to explain the myths in a logical way when it is quite obvious that with such a 'titanic'(thanks to MacRone) body of information and the different way that Romans looked upon life just cannot be explained fully and should just be cherished as they are.
His 'witty' add-ins are quite off-putting to me, but you might enjoy them, his remarks are more like the ones of an extremely world-tired, snide, snickering person. All in all, it did not seem like he had much respect for what he was writing about, that is not a good launching off point to get others interested, sadly for MacRone.
I would have given this 2 stars because of his inept way of trying to make a mountain into a molehole(I know it sounds strange), but between the snide comments and fallible explanations, there were some glimmers of the fabulous work from countless of Romans before our time.

It is a big help to everyones memory who had latin and or greek in his schooldays a long time ago and more. Especially in the last section THE PANTHEON has given me a clearer idea of the relationship among the gods.

I liked the book because it quickly covered a lot of material that I had forgotten, and it shows how many words and terms in the English language came from the Greeks.

This book is not only a great recreational resource, but an invaluable educational composition as well. I am in 8th grade, and when the mythology unit was started as part of the latin class, I brought this book to the teacher, really just so she could see where I was getting my information. She hasn't used another book since. I highly recommend it for all occasions; it gets my five stars and two thumbs up!