- Paperback: 224 pages
- Publisher: Hyperion (Feb 16 2005)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0786888369
- ISBN-13: 978-0786888368
- Product Dimensions: 20.3 x 13.5 x 1.4 cm
- Shipping Weight: 159 g
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #2,192,986 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
Homer's Odyssey provides little in the way of a psychological portrait of its hero. Beye, a professor emeritus of classics at CUNY, takes up where Homer left off in this sometimes compelling, sometimes pedantic psychobiography of the earliest Greek hero. Following the outline of The Odyssey, Beye chronicles Odysseus' life from his princely youth in Ithaca and his military exploits and leadership in Troy to his wanderings through the Mediterranean and his final homecoming to resume his place as king in Ithaca. In Beye's account, when Odysseus sets off for home after the Trojan War and 10 years of absence, he has difficulty recalling his wife Penelope's voice and face. Melancholy, he wonders also what kind of person his son, Telemachus, has grown up to be. Beye portrays Odysseus as humble yet "arrogant in his assumption of his own worth," cunning, wise, athletic and courageous, gregarious and sensual, concluding that Odysseus provided an exceptional role model to males in the ancient world. While Beye offers insights into the cultural context in which Odysseus might have grown up, his fictional biography cannot compare to Homer's suspenseful and engrossing tale of a hero's quest for self-discovery. Still, readers taken with Tom Cahill's discussion of Odysseus in Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea might find this a useful follow-up.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Booklist
Historians of fantastic literature claim the Odyssey, with its indomitable hero, quest plot, gods, and monsters, as one of the genre's wellsprings. Many other stories have been spun off from it, but Beye, whose The Iliad, the Odyssey and the Epic Tradition (1966) is an undergraduate staple, offers something different: a modern biography of Odysseus, a recapitulation of his life based upon documents and physical evidence and informed by psychology, archeology, anthropology, and other modern disciplines. The aim is to understand why Odysseus did what he did and said what he said about what he did. To avoid thrusting contemporary conceptions on his second-millennium-B.C.E. subject, Beye carefully constructs Odysseus as a Bronze Age fellow whose literal belief in gods obliges us to accept them as he did (the monsters are more problematic). The resulting portrait is far less a display of cleverness than, for Odyssey readers, a deeper understanding of an old acquaintance and, for those who fear reading a long poem, a dazzling introduction to one grandfather of us all. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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First Sentence
ODYSSEUS IS THE perpetual enigma who tells all and reveals nothing. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
ODYSSEUS IS THE perpetual enigma who tells all and reveals nothing. Read the first page
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Concordance
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
The "real" Odysseus,
By Nick Dubrule (Newton, MA USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Odysseus: A Life (Hardcover)
What I loved about Odysseus: A Life is that it indulges a desire to identify with this mythological character as if he were a person while simultaneously reminding one of the fundamentally Modern limits of this kind of identification. Along the way, Beye elaborates a breathtaking overview of Classical culture, vividly informed by his passionate knowledge of the literature. It is a highly enjoyable read, told with great irony and wit.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Red Hot,
By Casey Cameron (Palo Alto, CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Odysseus: A Life (Hardcover)
I knew when I read "Odysseus: A Life" that Charles Beye is no ordinary or academic academic. Once voted "Red Hot Prof" by the students at Stanford University, Beye is wonderfully skilled at blending his vivid imagination and his mastery of ancient Homeric poem, myth, and history. He re-creates the epic hero as a man you can't help but find fascinating and irresistibly appealing. This book is utterly satisfying!
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fun for Everyone,
By A Customer
This review is from: Odysseus: A Life (Audio Cassette)
The great thing about this book is that everyone can learn from it. Whether you are a junior high school student just embarking upon your own odyssey in the world of the classics, or a retired person trying to get back into the world of literature, or even a scholar with a good knowledge of Homer and his poems, Beye's book serves the useful function of creating a multi-dimensional character out of all of the available souces, not just a single one. In other words, Beye brings to life someone who is a mythic figure and endows him with a full set of human characteristics that allows us to recognize him as both an ancient hero and a contemporary. This is an enjoyable but also provocative and worthwhile reading and educational experience.
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