Full Circle
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| |||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Full Circle: How the Classical World Came Back to Us for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
'In characteristically wide-ranging style, Ferdinand Mount's Full Circle tackles the question of the legacy of the classical world' --New Statesman
`Mount mounts a compelling and amusing case' --Evening Standard
'A readable, stylish, expansive, occasionally sharp and stimulating series of reflections ranging widely over the modern world' --Literary Review
'In Mount's book . . . there is a feeling of growth and regeneration . . . Mount is at the peak of his career, and one feels there is a great deal more to come' --Philip Womack, Daily Telegraph
'Think we're addicted to fame? You should've seen us 2,000 years ago'
--Mail on Sunday
`An author of obvious erudition, with a great flair for anecdote' --Guardian
'A delightful excursion along the cultural loop line . . . conducted by a witty and knowledgeable guide . . . Take him with you on holiday: you won't regret it'
--Financial Times
`Elegant, interesting and funny . . . go out and buy it at once'
--Independent
`A delightful book: rumbustious, eclectic, erudite and stimulating, the vade mecum of a fine mind . . . its brilliance is something sui generic: quite its own' --Ross Leckie, Country Life
'Mount charms the reader ... is an entertaining guide to ancient Rome' --Sunday Times
'Full Circle is imbued with the same wit as its predecessor and is both entertaining and thought-provoking' --The Economist
'characteristically witty prose' --The Oldie
'It is a world which he makes, in his good-humoured and elegant style, seem amazingly contemporary.' --Daily Mail
'Aldous Huxley referred to himself as an "home de letters". If anyone could lay claim to that title, then it is surely Mount' --Daily Telegraph
'These parallels between the ancient world and ours are intriguing...[he] takes us with wit and charm through many absurdities of the remote past' --The Spectator
'...the triumph of the generalist, whose intellectual vigour trumps academic rigour. Take him with you on holiday: you won't regret it' --The Financial Times
'Mount's thesis... is lightly and humorously expressed...' --The Times
`Mount mounts a compelling and amusing case' --Evening Standard
'A readable, stylish, expansive, occasionally sharp and stimulating series of reflections ranging widely over the modern world' --Literary Review
'In Mount's book . . . there is a feeling of growth and regeneration . . . Mount is at the peak of his career, and one feels there is a great deal more to come' --Philip Womack, Daily Telegraph
'Think we're addicted to fame? You should've seen us 2,000 years ago'
--Mail on Sunday
`An author of obvious erudition, with a great flair for anecdote' --Guardian
'A delightful excursion along the cultural loop line . . . conducted by a witty and knowledgeable guide . . . Take him with you on holiday: you won't regret it'
--Financial Times
`Elegant, interesting and funny . . . go out and buy it at once'
--Independent
`A delightful book: rumbustious, eclectic, erudite and stimulating, the vade mecum of a fine mind . . . its brilliance is something sui generic: quite its own' --Ross Leckie, Country Life
'Mount charms the reader ... is an entertaining guide to ancient Rome' --Sunday Times
'Full Circle is imbued with the same wit as its predecessor and is both entertaining and thought-provoking' --The Economist
'characteristically witty prose' --The Oldie
'It is a world which he makes, in his good-humoured and elegant style, seem amazingly contemporary.' --Daily Mail
'Aldous Huxley referred to himself as an "home de letters". If anyone could lay claim to that title, then it is surely Mount' --Daily Telegraph
'These parallels between the ancient world and ours are intriguing...[he] takes us with wit and charm through many absurdities of the remote past' --The Spectator
'...the triumph of the generalist, whose intellectual vigour trumps academic rigour. Take him with you on holiday: you won't regret it' --The Financial Times
'Mount's thesis... is lightly and humorously expressed...' --The Times
Product Description
So much about the society that is now emerging in the twenty-first century bears an astonishing resemblance to the most prominent features of what we call the classical world - its institutions, its priorities, its entertainment, its physics, its sexual morality, its food, its politics, even its religion. The ways in which we live our rich and varied lives correspond - almost eerily so - to the ways in which the Greeks and Romans lived theirs. Whether we are eating and drinking, bathing or exercising or making love, pondering, admiring or enquiring, our habits of thought and action, our diversions and concentrations recreate theirs. It is as though the 1500 years after the fall of Rome had been time out from traditional ways of being human. This eye-opening book makes us look afresh at who we are and how we got here. Full Circle is not only wonderfully witty and brilliantly astute, but also profound and often disquieting. Ferdinand Mount effortlessly peels back 2000 years of history to show how much we are like the ancients, how in ways both trivial and crucial we are them and they are us.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
26 of 29 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Ferdinand Mount's latest book, a beautifully written account of the striking similarities between the modern and classical ways of life and the contrast with the Christian era in between, is by turns playful and profound.
He divides the book into two sections, the first looking at 'body' which discusses attitudes to bathing, exercise, sex and food, and then moves on to 'mind', where he looks for analogs between Greek and Roman ways of seeing and understanding the world and our own. For me it's the second section that really makes this book stand out. Here we are treated to sections on religion, fame, nature and dialogue, and as you would expect from such weighty subjects, the tone becomes a bit more serious and the linkages more subtle.
I'm a sociologist/psychologist by training, and a history addict by inclination, so I suppose a book like this was always going to pique my interest, but having read it in the space of about 5 days (mostly whilst sitting up late at night with my 3 week old baby girl who is having trouble sleeping) I have to say it is one of the best and most enjoyable books I've read for quite a while. It's very easy to read, despite the weighty topics.
I particularly enjoyed the last couple of chapters, which are quite profound - and, in the end, very funny.
The idea behind the book is something I have thought about before myself, but in relation to the ever more violent 'all in' martial arts that are proving increasingly popular on TV these days and are quickly catching up with the relatively pedestrian boxing in terms of fans and profile - another post-Christian return to Roman sensitivities (or lack of them)? Mr. Mount has done a great job of identifying many other areas where our two cultures meet, despite the intervening two millennia, and makes convincing arguments to suggest the spirits of these two epochs are comparable in many ways - but with one crucial difference.
He divides the book into two sections, the first looking at 'body' which discusses attitudes to bathing, exercise, sex and food, and then moves on to 'mind', where he looks for analogs between Greek and Roman ways of seeing and understanding the world and our own. For me it's the second section that really makes this book stand out. Here we are treated to sections on religion, fame, nature and dialogue, and as you would expect from such weighty subjects, the tone becomes a bit more serious and the linkages more subtle.
I'm a sociologist/psychologist by training, and a history addict by inclination, so I suppose a book like this was always going to pique my interest, but having read it in the space of about 5 days (mostly whilst sitting up late at night with my 3 week old baby girl who is having trouble sleeping) I have to say it is one of the best and most enjoyable books I've read for quite a while. It's very easy to read, despite the weighty topics.
I particularly enjoyed the last couple of chapters, which are quite profound - and, in the end, very funny.
The idea behind the book is something I have thought about before myself, but in relation to the ever more violent 'all in' martial arts that are proving increasingly popular on TV these days and are quickly catching up with the relatively pedestrian boxing in terms of fans and profile - another post-Christian return to Roman sensitivities (or lack of them)? Mr. Mount has done a great job of identifying many other areas where our two cultures meet, despite the intervening two millennia, and makes convincing arguments to suggest the spirits of these two epochs are comparable in many ways - but with one crucial difference.
8 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
The book describes the similarities between our modern world and the classical Greek and Roman's world.
Bath, exercise, sex, food, art, religion , fame, culture, nature, who would say our way of seeing and understanding them are much the same of the classical world ?
The book takes you from the SPA to the Baths of Caracala, from the gym to the gymnasium , (the body is beautiful, the body become a god); from the sex free of guilt to Cattullus advocating sex with women or sex with man because there no such a thing as rigth and wrong in this context; from the celebrity culture to the Roman obsession with fame; from the understanding that the world is composed of matter and is no more immortal than we are, to Lucretiu's "So it is a fair inference that sky and earth too had their birthday and will have their day of doom".
Quite profound, but easy and enjoyable to read this is a book to anyone interested in the culture and spirit of our epoch.
Bath, exercise, sex, food, art, religion , fame, culture, nature, who would say our way of seeing and understanding them are much the same of the classical world ?
The book takes you from the SPA to the Baths of Caracala, from the gym to the gymnasium , (the body is beautiful, the body become a god); from the sex free of guilt to Cattullus advocating sex with women or sex with man because there no such a thing as rigth and wrong in this context; from the celebrity culture to the Roman obsession with fame; from the understanding that the world is composed of matter and is no more immortal than we are, to Lucretiu's "So it is a fair inference that sky and earth too had their birthday and will have their day of doom".
Quite profound, but easy and enjoyable to read this is a book to anyone interested in the culture and spirit of our epoch.
13 of 18 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Ferdinand Mount is a writer of considerable ability and facility, and this makes it easy for him to put together a catena of more and less accurate facts and observations and offer it as if it were a justifiable thesis or as a set of insights.
Far from being either of those, it is a collection of weak correlations masquerading as scholarship. He says that the modern world has striking similarities with the ancient world, yet feels free to ignore the fact that the classical world covers several hundred years of complex history and includes widely differing cultures. Take a big enough time-frame and geographical spread, decide not to be too careful about the criteria for similarity, and write in vague, generalising terms and you can always find apparent parallels between any age & culture and any other.
If a work like this was submitted to a publisher by a writer who hasn't got Mount's cachet then the only outcome would be a rejection slip. Quite simply, it is impossible to take Mount's book seriously.
Far from being either of those, it is a collection of weak correlations masquerading as scholarship. He says that the modern world has striking similarities with the ancient world, yet feels free to ignore the fact that the classical world covers several hundred years of complex history and includes widely differing cultures. Take a big enough time-frame and geographical spread, decide not to be too careful about the criteria for similarity, and write in vague, generalising terms and you can always find apparent parallels between any age & culture and any other.
If a work like this was submitted to a publisher by a writer who hasn't got Mount's cachet then the only outcome would be a rejection slip. Quite simply, it is impossible to take Mount's book seriously.
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Most Recent Customer Reviews
A mostly sardonic look at the state we are in
The argument of this book is that, after two millennia or so of Christian culture, we are in many ways reverting to the attitudes and tastes of classical antiquity. Read more
Published 12 months ago by Ralph Blumenau
Full Circle
I sent the book to a friend so I don't know yet what they thought of it. I do have a copy myself which I find interesting and well worth anyone who feels that history goes in... Read more
Published 12 months ago by M. D. Vickers
Generalism & Cliche.
The classical age (of Greece and Rome) can not be compared directly to the postmodern age, and yet the entire premise of this book rests upon the idea that the two very different... Read more
Published 19 months ago by ShiDaDao Ph.D
amateurish
This is not a bad book, but it is not as profound and well founded as one would expect from someone with Mount's credentials. Read more
Published 20 months ago by Katerina
Brilliant. Who else could credibly condescend to Richard Dawkins?
This book is thoroughly entertaining, wonderful for broadening what an educated American considers an already broad vocabulary, and displays an encyclopedic knowledge of his... Read more
Published 21 months ago by Graham H. Seibert
Listmania!
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
