Mighty Dead Why Homer Matters: Nicolson, Adam: 9780007335534: Amazon.com: Books

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Mighty Dead Why Homer Matters Paperback – January 1, 2015

by Adam Nicolson (Author)

4.5 369 ratings

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Language

English
Publisher

William Collins
Publication date

January 1, 2015
Dimensions

5.08 x 1.02 x 7.8 inches
ISBN-10

9780007335534
ISBN-13

978-0007335534
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Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0007335539
Publisher ‏ : ‎ William Collins (January 1, 2015)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780007335534
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0007335534
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.08 x 1.02 x 7.8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #139,944 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #121 in Ancient Greek History (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.5 369 ratings

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Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5

369 global ratings

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Reviewed in the United States on August 16, 2014

Verified Purchase

A very well researched and insightful look at a wonderful piece of our past. Great read and informative references. Captured the essence of the tale.

12 people found this helpful

Really insightful

Reviewed in the United States on August 14, 2019

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So detailed and interesting.

One person found this helpful

A poignant, subjective, post-modern journey

Reviewed in the United States on October 30, 2015

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I bought this book because of its title: Why Homer Matters. I wanted to know the significance of the Iliad and the Odyssey for our lives today. So I was expecting that question to be addressed throughout the book in a variety of ways. Instead, that question is saved for the last two or three pages. The answer provided is brief, poignant and post-modern. But the entire book builds up to those last two pages with the author passionately and poetically exploring the images, tensions, and terrors in Homer. This is a very subjective journey into Homer, informed by scholarship but daring to go its own way. Its start is a bit slow, making its way to Homer via Keats, and a few other spots are over-extended, but I learned a lot along the way, and I see these two great epics in some new ways. Nevertheless, it's not quite the book I was hoping for.

15 people found this helpful

Elizabeth Hughes

Reviewed in the United States on May 30, 2015

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Fabulous book! Totally engrossing.

3 people found this helpful

A work of genius.

Reviewed in the United States on July 26, 2015

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What a talent Adam Nicolson has! It feels such a privilege to journey with him through this book, sharing his love of Homer and the insights he provides about Homer's work and its relevance to our own lives. A work of genius!

6 people found this helpful

... had read a library copy of this book and liked it so much that I ordered a copy for ...

Reviewed in the United States on August 5, 2015

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I had read a library copy of this book and liked it so much that I ordered a copy for myself so that I could refer to it whenever I wished.

11 people found this helpful

Edward Primrose

Essential reading for lovers of Ancient Greek history

Reviewed in the United States on June 4, 2015

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A sometimes prolix but totally engaging re-examination of the Iliad and the Odyssey, while bringing the stories into contemporary relevance. Brilliantly researched, laced with anecdotes, some of them brutally personal, Adam Nicolson convincingly argues for a reappraisal of the works' authorship and chronology. Thoroughly entertaining, the audio version is also highly recommended. Homer does matter.

12 people found this helpful

savvas E. raftopoulos

Very personal account

Reviewed in the United States on February 17, 2019

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A passionate and engrossing read.

One person found this helpful

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Edvardas

A perspective on the Trojan War

Reviewed in Germany on May 1, 2022

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A reader reported that he kept it on his bedside table. Like he I read it slowly.So many surprising facts and perspectives on Greeks, Trojans, Phoenicians, the Mediterranean world.

Eduardo Vieira

Uma análise muito pessoal de Homero

Reviewed in Brazil on May 26, 2016

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Esse livro é muito interessante. O autor nos conta o momento em que os épicos de Homero entraram em sua vida (não por acaso, durante uma complicada travessia de barco nos mares da Inglaterra) e daí parte para diversas análises sobre a força desses textos.

Ele não só busca suas origens, não só na língua escrita, mas na cultura oral que a precederam, e nos leva a entender as populações nômades que povoaram a Grécia durante a idade do bronze.

É um livro muito bem pesquisado, mas não é um livro acadêmico. Algumas de suas teses são diferentes do que é postulado no mainstream, principalmente sobre o momento no tempo da guerra de tróia, que ele acredita ser anterior a data com a qual os estudiosos trabalham.

O ponto forte do livro é quando ele traz o significado dos épicos para a sua vida. Momentos pungentes da vida (como um momento onde o autor se viu a beira da morte, não vou contar o motivo) encontram paralelos na narrativa homérica.

Resumindo, é uma análise moderna e muito pessoal dos textos gregos. É uma boa leitura, embora alguns capítulos sejam muito longos e se percam quanto ao tema originalmente proposto.

One person found this helpful

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Dave the Rave

Why I went into a different field

Reviewed in Canada on August 3, 2015

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This is simply the best book of lit-crit that I have read since “The Well-Wrought Urn”. That book convinced me that I needed to go into a different field than English; this book reminded me of why I love to read. In doing so, the author use a sailing metaphor to investigate the many facets of the Iliad/Odyssey. From integrating archeological cues into the patterns of these books to investigating hermeneutic phrases that link the Greek warriors with their distance relatives on the steppe of Asia, the author illustrates how each of these books grapple with issues that face us now. Gang-mental meets cities on the verge of city-state, allegiance to hide bound traditions faces the need to adapt, scientific advances (in this case boats with sails and chariots that reduce the time it takes to get from Greece to Egypt to just days) in conflict with individual feats of greatness are all themes that are taken up by great authors of our times. The only jarring moment was when the author shared his account of being homosexually raped as an example of how convincing argument sharp steel can make. I thought it was louche and barely avoided archeology-porn. Nevertheless, the rest of the book compensated and I was sad to put it down.

3 people found this helpful

Mr B

Why Homer matters. Nicolson

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 7, 2015

Verified Purchase

One may have read the rave reviews from the media when the hardback edition was shortlisted for books of the year in 2014. Media reviewers, unless it is for something like the TLS, rarely explain the reason for their superlatives, so we may be left with a kind of generalised adulation which, because it is generalised, fits into the linguistic contingencies of the PR machinery. I got this partly because of the subject and partly because of the reviews. On reading, I was hooked, very quickly. The first thing that struck me was the quality of the writing, two criteria being clarity and fluidity that writers of first chapters - be it fiction or non-fiction, spend some time and care on; the quality in the main was sustained, and there were passages that I found very beautiful; for example when Nicolson is talking about his experience of sailing and the sea, or when he is paraphrasing an incident in the Odyssey or Illiad, and one has the sense that his love for Homer has enabled Homer again to speak to us. This is really what the book is all about, and why Homer matters.
For anyone who is interested in say, the development of Greek Philosophy, one becomes aware of the Greecean diaspora as Rome established herself, but Homer and Plato ran ahead, in the same sort of way that Shakespeare and Mozart ran ahead of their times, because as their times diminished, their influence did not. Nicolson does not waste time with discussing Plato's view of Homer, for that is not his brief: his brief is to put Homer in context, and the considered erudition does that. Considered, because a) he is aware of what constitutes' popular' in that it must be comprehensible, and if possible, seen as relevant; and b) he is also aware of an innate wish to learn about our origins. He does this by adopting a number of different voices: the archeologist, talking about how pervasive Bronze Age culture was; the travel writer, going to places referred to, and describing them in a manner of the Welsh or Irish poets; the ethnologist, talking about the memory of the tribe and traditions of story telling - without reading a book; the poet, talking about the importance of metre in song; the anthologist, talking how people take their stories with them, and adapt them; the linguist, talking about the origins of language as reflected in the spoken language before it really took on a written form; and so on.
The level of scholarship is very high, but its fruits are not treated like items in isolation, for the very structure of the whole piece, enables one body of information to flow into the next without disruption, while at the same time enriching it. So for example, parallels can be drawn between the gangs in America and their motivations, and the warrior groups outside Troy and their motivations. I will never, be able to think about the Bronze Age in the same way again; indeed I will never be able to think about what Homer has given us, in the same way again. This is historical writing with a difference: it invites both reflection and re-evaluation.
The book is full of surprises, not only when our preconceptions are challenged, but also insightful parallels. I remember reading a book by a French archeologist who was convinced that the Odyssey was a Mariner's code, so that for example, the whirlpools of Scylla and Charybdis are not in the Mediterranean, but off the coast of Scotland., and their modern description and names, fits the description in the Odyssey. Links between burial mounds in Ireland and those in the eastern Mediterranean are because they were of the same cross -european epoch. Nicolson has been to the Bronze age Tine mines in Spain, and describes them as Hades; I have been to Newgrange in Ireland, and will never forget the experience - his book has enriched that experience.
If Plato was about discovering the Truth, Homer is about accepting reality as it is experienced. Odysseus epitomises the Greek virtue of metis; Achilles on the other hand, in my eyes at least, now represents something totally different, and in a way something much more profound. This is not to reduce the Prodigal Son motif which permeates the Odyssey, Achilles just provides another viewpoint. Nicolson quotes Simone Weil at the end of the book, as a wise woman; perhaps a representative of Athene, who knows?

6 people found this helpful

The Late Reviewer

perhaps like the shadow of Hamlet's father

Reviewed in Australia on April 1, 2016

Verified Purchase

An absolute cracker of a book. Yes, I know: my review *might* be more colloquial than classical but that's just the way I roll.

Homer, perhaps like the shadow of Hamlet's father, has always been there as part of the Western canon. We know he is part of us and somehow understands us better than we might understand ourselves and yet... there's an academic and apparently cultural wall between us that means we never quite grasp why some archaic tales might still have relevance today. According to Mr. Nicholson they do and I really appreciated his book in explaining why that is.

This is a book for anyone who wants to understand why Homer is still in print. It's a book for anyone who wants to consider what it means to be human in the modern context when, for many, there is often a lingering doubt that what we are today isn't somehow false to what we should rather be.

Nicholson examines in this book the works of Homer. He evaluates the development of story telling, he offers wonderful insights into the language of the Greeks and how it reflected their environment, their beliefs and how the it all worked to create a war that remains beautiful in its horror.

One person found this helpful

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