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Songs on Bronze The Greek Myths Made Real Nigel Spivey 9780374530372 Books

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Songs on Bronze The Greek Myths Made Real Nigel Spivey 9780374530372 Books

I bought this book with high hopes, but could not finish it. While the intention might be honorable, the work is very poorly done and often even wrong.

Too light for nonfiction, too flat-footed for fiction, infused with 80's pop psychology, this book misses the point of every one of the stories. Worse, the author has made stunningly careless errors: in the most obvious example, he makes Ares, the God of War, responsible (due to boredom with the wedding of Peleus and Thetis) for the mischief that led to the Judgement of Paris. But it wasn't Ares, of course; it was Eris the goddess of discord who resented not having been invited to the wedding. Every Greek schoolchild knows this - why on earth wouldn't a highly educated adult 'expert?' This error makes the whole story incoherent, and drastically cheapens its meaning.

This is a sorry book; asking too little of history, giving too little to those who might honestly depend on it for information, so intent on modernizing that it forgets it must also involve compelling writing, careless with its subjects, and completely misunderstanding the purpose of myth.

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Tags : Songs on Bronze: The Greek Myths Made Real [Nigel Spivey] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. <DIV><B>A vivid, uninhibited retelling of the classic Greek stories</B><BR><BR><I>Songs on Bronze </I>is the first major retelling of Greek mythology in half a century; a set of lively,Nigel Spivey,Songs on Bronze: The Greek Myths Made Real,Farrar, Straus and Giroux,0374530378,Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology,Fairy Tales, Folklore & Mythology,Fiction,Fiction - General,Fiction Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology,Fiction-Fairy Tales, Folklore & Mythology,FolkloreMythology,GENERAL,GRECO-ROMAN MYTHOLOGY,General Adult,Literature: FolkloreMythology,United States

Songs on Bronze The Greek Myths Made Real Nigel Spivey 9780374530372 Books Reviews

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Nigel Spivey's prose is a delight to read. One hopes that young people will benefit from Spivey's synopses of some of the better-known myths of Classical Greece. The book, as Spivey himself notes in the introduction, was written to help educate his own children -- lucky children to have such a father in a day and age when children are schooled rather than being educated.
This is the second time I've purchased this book. The first time I read this was while I was actually touring the ancient sites in Greece. Nigel Spivey is a very talented writer. He makes the stories feel timeless; relatable in todays world. I could imagine them taking place as I walked those ancient ruins. I purchased the second copy for my adult son. He would watch a historic program and always feel the lack of a deeper understanding for the ancients and there beliefs. This book will fill that void.
Despite the apparent similarities, the Greek world is so far away from ours as to be almost impenetrable. Without a rock-solid academic background, talking about Greek myths is risky, offering them to the general public is reckless. Dr Spivey, a well-known Cambridge classicist, must be praised for this effort. He simplifies a bit, but retains a lot. The result is excellent. His retellings are both informative and thoroughly enjoyable.
Spivey is a professor of Classics at Cambridge University, so I expected a little more from him than this. I can appreciate what he was trying to do, retelling the ancient myths for today's audience. But he didn't carry it off very well. Here's a clue adding sex scenes does not make it modern.

Also his understandings of the myths leave something to be desired. An example, he makes Andromeda a black woman. Why? For the sake of political correctness? Well it's true that she was a princess of Ethiopia. But the nation of Ethiopia back then was not where the modern country is. Back then, Ethiopia was a Phoenician kingdom (not a black African one) stretching from Syria down to the shores of the Red Sea. Maybe Spivey thought having an interracial romance makes the story more hip, but it makes it less authentic.
I enjoyed listening to these stories (I have the audiobook version). I've heard bits and pieces of the Greek myths throughout my lifetime, but never as whole stories.

I was almost persuaded not to buy it based on the one negative review that referred to "psycobabble" [sic] but fortunately, I found nothing of the sort. The writing (and narration) just sounded fresh and current to me.

Maybe part of the lesson is not to trust people who cannot spell "psychobabble" correctly, a hint that they don't know the meaning of the word.
This is an abbreviated retelling of some of the most important stories from Greek mythology, in contemporary language. It is well written, with a literary style befitting the subject; but the stories have been abridged so that you don't get bogged down in trivial details; and the language is modern enough so that you don't have to agonize your way through it, struggling to figure out what the author is trying to say.

The contents include

Prelude Orpheus in Love

I. AN EARLY CHILDHOOD OF THE WORLD

Out of Chaos

Prometheus and Pandora

Demeter and Persephone

II. HEROES IN THE MAKING

Herakles

Theseus

Perseus

Jason and the Argonauts

III. WAR ABOUT TROY

The Judgment of Paris

The Wrath of Achilles

Troy Taken

IV. A HERO'S COMING HOME

The Travels of Odysseus

V. THE STUFF OF TRAGEDY

The House of Atreus

Oedipus

Unending Orpheus in the Underworld

To give you a better sense of what sort of book this is, here is a brief excerpt from the Author's Note

"Songs on Bronze originated from the desire to fashion a single, organic narrative of as much Greek mythology as most people might want or need to know.

"This means a less than comprehensive work. Not every tale of the ancient Greek repertoire has been included here. Some stories ... are much abbreviated. I wanted this book to be a fluent read, not an unrelenting inventory of names, places, and atrocious events. ...

"At the outset I intended to write this book for my young children -- with due regard for their delicate sensibilities. They, however, grew up more quickly than I wrote. So I accepted the violence and sensuality of the myths, and made little effort to purify them. ..."

This is a fun introduction to the stories of Greek mythology.
I bought this book with high hopes, but could not finish it. While the intention might be honorable, the work is very poorly done and often even wrong.

Too light for nonfiction, too flat-footed for fiction, infused with 80's pop psychology, this book misses the point of every one of the stories. Worse, the author has made stunningly careless errors in the most obvious example, he makes Ares, the God of War, responsible (due to boredom with the wedding of Peleus and Thetis) for the mischief that led to the Judgement of Paris. But it wasn't Ares, of course; it was Eris the goddess of discord who resented not having been invited to the wedding. Every Greek schoolchild knows this - why on earth wouldn't a highly educated adult 'expert?' This error makes the whole story incoherent, and drastically cheapens its meaning.

This is a sorry book; asking too little of history, giving too little to those who might honestly depend on it for information, so intent on modernizing that it forgets it must also involve compelling writing, careless with its subjects, and completely misunderstanding the purpose of myth.

.