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In a spectacular journey through mythical and modern landscapes, Adam Nicolson explores the places forever haunted by their Homeric heroes. From Sicily, awash with wildflowers shadowed by Italy's largest oil refinery, to Ithaca, southern Spain, and the mountains on the edges of Andalusia and Extremadura, to the deserted, irradiated steppes of Chernobyl, where Homeric warriors still lie under the tumuli, unexcavated. This is a world of springs and drought, seas and cities, with not a tourist in sight. And all sewn together by the poems themselves and their great metaphors of life and suffering.
Showing us the real roots of Homeric consciousness, the physical environment that fills the gaps between the words of the poems themselves, Nicolson's is itself a Homeric journey. A wandering meditation on lost worlds, our interconnectedness with our ancestors, and the surroundings we share. This is the original meeting of place and mind, our empathy with the past, our landscape as our drama.
Following the acclaimed Gentry, which established him as one of the great landscape writers working today, Nicolson takes Homer's poems back to their source: beneath the distant, god-inhabited mountains, on the Trojan plains above the graves of the heroic dead, we find afresh the foundation level of human experience on earth.
"Starred Review. Nicolson's spirited exploration illuminates our own indelible past." - Kirkus
"In this passionate, deeply personal book, Nicolson explains why Homer matters - to him, to you, to the world - in a text full of twists, turns, and surprises." - Publishers Weekly
"[Why Homer Matters] is a moving personal musing on Homer - on what he has to say to us today about life and about ourselves." - Alexander McCall Smith, Daily Mail (UK)
"Erudite, far-ranging in time and space, and provocative ... This rich and adventurous book is Nicolson's own odyssey, a wide-eyed ramble around the ancient world and through the centuries ... Nicolson's enthusiasm [is] enriching and his examination of the character of the two epics acute and fascinating." - Literary Review (UK)
"Through the prism of this great poet, Nicolson has crafted a kind of metaphysical guidebook on how to lead a meaningful life in in a world of terrifying and wondrous change." - Nathaniel Philbrick, author of In the Heart of the Sea and Bunker Hill
"Seldom have I been so moved, inspired, informed and delighted as by Adam Nicolson's elegant explanation of why Homer - so long forgotten in the school-time haze - is so vitally important as a lifetime vade mecum." - Simon Winchester, author of The Professor and the Madman and The Men Who United the States
This information about Why Homer Matters was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Adam Nicolson is the author of many books on history, landscape, and great literature. He is the winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, the W. H. Heinemann Award, and the Ondaatje Prize. His books include The Life Between the Tides and Why Homer Matters. He lives on a farm in Sussex.
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