The Future of the Past by Alexander Stille is “[a] fascinating tour of the past as it exists today, and of the dangers that threaten it, through incisive portraits of our attempts to maintain it: the high-tech struggles to save the Great Sphinx and the Ganges; the efforts to preserve Latin within the Vatican; the…
Category: Et Cetera
Classical New York: Discovering Greece and Rome in Gotham, Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis and Matthew M. McGowan, edd.
“During the rise of New York from the capital of an upstart nation to a global metropolis, the visual language of Greek and Roman antiquity played a formative role in the development of the city’s art and architecture. This compilation of essays offers a survey of diverse reinterpretations of classical forms in some of New…
Latin: Story of a World Language, Jürgen Leonhardt
“The mother tongue of the Roman Empire and the lingua franca of the West for centuries after Rome’s fall, Latin survives today primarily in classrooms and texts. Yet this “dead language” is unique in the influence it has exerted across centuries and continents.” In Latin: Story of a World Language, “Jürgen Leonhardt has written a…
First Principles: What America’s Founders Learned From the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country, Thomas E. Ricks
Stunned by the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, Thomas E. Ricks felt compelled to ask a question that is just as pertinent now as it was then: “What is America supposed to be, anyway?” His search for an answer led him back to the Revolutionary generation to discover their original vision for the nation.…
The Ingenious Language: Nine Epic Reasons to Love Greek, Andrea Marcolongo
The Ingenious Language: Nine Epic Reasons to Love Greek by Andrea Marcolongo is for word nerds, language loons, and grammar geeks, an impassioned and informative literary leap into the wonders of the Greek language. Here are nine ways Greek can transform your relationship to time and to those around you, nine reflections on the language…
The Celestial Hunter, Roberto Calasso
“By becoming hunters, Roberto Calasso asserts in The Celestial Hunter, mankind, originally prey not predator, separated from the rest of the animals. This in turn provoked a new anxiety. ‘Once he had completed the step to predation, Homo didn’t know how to deal with that new part of his nature,’ Calasso writes. ‘He invented hunting…
Antigone Rising, Helen Morales
“This is not your usual ‘why the classics are crucial’ book, Charlotte Higgins observes about Antigone Rising. “Helen Morales has produced a passionate, deeply felt account of the ways in which myths have reinforced the most harmful narratives of social control – or been unlocked to help lift them. It is a book infused with…