Greece Hotels Travel - Ancient Greece: A Political, Social and Cultural History
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List Price: $54.95
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Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 938
EAN: 9780195308006
ISBN: 019530800X
Label: Oxford University Press, USA
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 592
Publication Date: 2007-08-06
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Studio: Oxford University Press, USA
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Editorial Reviews:
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Written by four leading authorities on the classical world, Ancient Greece, Second Edition, introduces students to the history and civilization of ancient Greece in all its complexity and variety. A comprehensive history, this captivating study covers the entire period from the Bronze Age through the Hellenistic Era, integrating the most recent research in archaeology, comparative anthropology, and social history with a traditional yet lively narrative of political, military, cultural, economic, and diplomatic history. Using physical evidence from archaeology, the written testimony of literary texts and inscriptions, and anthropological models based on comparative studies, Ancient Greece, Second Edition, offers an account of the Greek world that is thoughtful and sophisticated yet accessible to students with little or no knowledge of Greece. The book is enhanced by text boxes featuring excerpts from ancient documents, an extensive glossary, and a timeline and general introduction that provide a bird's-eye view of Greek history.
Revised and updated throughout, the second edition features:
* More in-depth coverage of such social and cultural topics as women and family life, material culture, religion, law, homosexuality, slavery, athletics, and life in the countryside
* A revised art program that includes a new 8-page full-color photo insert, 125 black-and-white photographs (55 of them new), 15 line drawings, and 17 new and improved custom-drawn maps
* Key terms--in boldface type when they first appear in the text and listed at the end of each chapter
* Selective, up-to-date recommendations for further reading
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: This one deserves six stars!!!
Comment: Wow, what a masterpiece! I started my self-conducted study of ancient Greek history with a different textbook. A good one but it did not impress me quite as much as this one. Written in a clear and fluent language, covering the whole range of Greece's ancient histoy and enriched with excellent pictures and diagrams, it makes the reading not only highly informative but also pleasant and entertaining, giving both beginners and students in the area a solid foundation for further and more specialised reading. It was sad to read some of the shallow and one-sided comments on here from people who certainly don't have the capability to realize the authors' didactic skill to reach out to a broad spectrum of readers of such a complex, broad and magnificent subject. This text rekindled my passion for the ancient world and gave me a great deal of motivation to pursue further reading on other aspects of ancient Hellas such as Religion, Politics, Mythology and so forth. If you're looking for a solid foundation and inspiration, I strongly recommend this book. Hail Pallas Athena!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good textbook - not so good writing
Comment: This is a good textbook, which is simple and easy to use. However, I am dissapointed in the level of writing skills of its authors. Many sentences use the same word twice as if their was no imagination on the part of the authors. Over all it is no better or worse than most textbooks I have read.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Sacrifices detail; no original research.
Comment: This is not a terrible book. It is OK, perhaps pretty good. Let us discuss its virtues: it is clear and simple. There are many pretty pictures, most of which are well-chosen. Unlike many things I have read in the ancient world recently (such as the Oxford Classical Dictionary's awful definition of pornography) the political correctness is quite intelligent, bridled, and well-balanced, not strident or out of control at all. The authors even take the "Goddess" school to task, gently pointing out that, pace the Merlin Stone and Gimbutas School, the view that Old Europe once together worshipped a female goddess is out of style. I like that, and I like the generally balanced viewpoints on many things: it's not too left wing, not terribly right wing. It takes into account recent observations without becoming crippled by an orthodox postmodernism, either.
That was the good part. Here's the bad part. It's bland. Clear, yes: but bland. Second, most of its clarity derives from its refusal to give specifics. The book is truly aimed for highschoolers, not college students. (Perhaps junior college in California: I'll compromise.) Compare it with Raphael Sealey's excellent "A History of the Greek City States" on any section -- take Peisistratus for an example. True, Sealey doesn't have chapters entitled "Women in Greece," but he certainly has done his own research rather than blandly blending the research of others. That's the biggest problem with this book: it bears the mark of a general general textbook seven generations from any original research.
It's not horrible. It would be quite suitable, for example , for my mother or your grandmother or someone like that who has little college education. The pictures are pretty; it moves along fine, though sacrificing detail greatly. It's much too expensive for a cheap paperback, though. Perhaps the expense is the pictures: it's certainly not the fine writing or original research.
Customer Rating:
Summary: I can't put down enough praise.
Comment: Luckily, this was the first book I ever read about Ancient Greece and I feel very fortuneate about it. Book is very comprehensive in many ways, and it is both extremely entertaining as well as informative. There is just about everything you need to know. I had fragments of information that I have gathered through out my life and this book just filled the missing gap. This book did not just lay facts, but had various parables and also had interesting references from many other sources. It want into details of many lives and I learned about Alexander the Great, Plato, about Sparta and contrasting Athens and more. This book is quite long but never boring, and you can read it like any other fiction books. Some topics will interest you more and will lead you to other books. In my case I have bought Plutarch's lives.
Customer Rating:
Summary: maybe best afordable text, but marred by committee-speak
Comment: I've used this text in my Greek Civilization course and I find that it has a wide range of material and reflects the latest trends in scholarship. For some courses I prefer Demand's History of Ancient Greece because it is more concise and better written--the short chapters give me more freedom to assign original Greek texts. But the price for that small text is outrageous!The reason I'm provoked to write this review is I'm looking over the reading I assigned my students for today. See Pomeroy p. 246, the first paragraph on the Peloponnesian War, beginning "Avoiding war was particularly important when the Greeks has such precious achievements to protect in so many areas." The paragraph goes downhill from there. A horrible, scattered introduction which does nothing to convey why this central episode of Greek history was so important to the Greeks and retains its importance today. On many occasions the blah prose of this text renders the most interesting moments of Greek history dull and soporific.
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