Try our new book recommendation quiz to get recommendations tailored to your preferences.

Book Summary and Reviews of Why Homer Matters by Adam Nicolson

Why Homer Matters by Adam Nicolson

Why Homer Matters

by Adam Nicolson

  • Critics' Consensus:
  • Published:
  • Nov 2014, 320 pages
  • Rate this book

  • Buy This Book

About this book

Book Summary

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.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

Media Reviews

"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.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Author Information

Adam Nicolson Author Biography

Adam Nicolson writes books on history and the landscape. He was born in 1957, the son of the author Nigel Nicolson and grandson of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West. He was educated at Eton and Magdalene College, Cambridge. He has worked widely as a journalist (British Press Awards Feature Writer of the Year 1997, shortlist) and for many years wrote weekly columns in the Daily and Sunday Telegraph. He lives at Sissinghurst in Kent with his wife Sarah Raven and is the father of five children.

A New York Times bestselling author, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Society of Antiquaries in Scotland, Adam Nicolson has won many major awards including the Somerset Maugham Award, the W. H. Heinemann Award, and the Ondaatje Prize. His books include Why Homer Matters ...

... Full Biography

Other books by Adam Nicolson at BookBrowse
  • Life Between the Tides jacket
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

More Recommendations

Readers Also Browsed . . .

more history, current affairs and religion...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: Model Home
    Model Home
    by Rivers Solomon
    Rivers Solomon's novel Model Home opens with a chilling and mesmerizing line: "Maybe my mother is ...
  • Book Jacket: The Mighty Red
    The Mighty Red
    by Louise Erdrich
    Permit me to break the fourth wall. Like any good reviewer, I aim to analyze a book dispassionately,...
  • Book Jacket: The Palace of Eros
    The Palace of Eros
    by Caro De Robertis
    When male suitors intended for her older sisters spread a rumor that Psyche's beauty surpasses that ...
  • Book Jacket: Rejection
    Rejection
    by Tony Tulathimutte
    A young man identifying as a feminist tumbles down the incel rabbit hole after a lifetime of sexual ...

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    In the Garden of Monsters
    by Crystal King

    A woman with no past, a man who knows her, and a monstrous garden that separates their worlds.

  • Book Jacket

    The Naming Song
    by Jedediah Berry

    Miyazaki meets Guillermo del Toro.

Book Club Giveaway!
Win Let Us Descend

Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward

Jesmyn Ward imagines the life of an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War in this instant classic.

Enter

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

J O the B

and be entered to win..

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.