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"A stylish and original cultural history of Knossos." (Economist) "Fascinating and consistently entertaining.... It is a tribute to the wit and clarity of Gere's style that she is able to explain all this without making the reader's brain ache." (Times Literary Supplement) "Cathy Gere re-creates a century of bizarre misreadings of the nearly unknown ancient culture of Crete, and in doing so has produced that rarest of literary surprises: a genuinely hilarious work of Minoan historiography." (Benjamin Moser, Harper's) "Gere attempts to understand the archaeologists, architects, artists, classicists, writers, and poets who reconstructed Minoan Crete in our time. And she does so brilliantly." (Library Journal) "The implications of this fascinating book extend far beyond the island that is its focus." (Science) "A brilliant study of the role of Knossos in twentieth-century culture.... Gere writes with clarity and wit, but she never sacrifices the fascinating complexity of her tale to a simple story line." (New York Review of Books)"
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In the spring of 1900, British archaeologist Arthur Evans began to excavate the palace of Knossos on Crete, bringing ancient Greek legends to life just as a new century dawned amid far-reaching questions about human history, art, and culture. With Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism, Cathy Gere relates the fascinating story of Evans' excavation and its long-term effects on Western culture. After World War I left the Enlightenment dream in tatters, the lost paradise that Evans offered in the concrete labyrinth - pacifist and matriarchal, pagan and cosmic - seemed to offer a new way forward for writers, artists, and thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Giorgio de Chirico, Robert Graves, and Hilda Doolittle. Assembling a brilliant, talented, and eccentric cast at a moment of tremendous intellectual vitality and wrenching change, Gere paints an unforgettable portrait of the age of concrete and the birth of modernism.
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6 reviews
23 of 25 people found the following review helpful
A Knessecary Knossos
14 Jun 2009
Format:Hardcover
First, this book demonstrates what clarity in academic writing is all about. The author makes a transit of nearly two hundred years in the analysis of the reception of the archaeological works on the island of Crete. Did I enjoy reading this book? Absolutely, I did. Though I enjoyed this author's previous work on the tomb of Agamemnon more, I admire this book more for its degree of difficulty and its clarity in defiance of that difficulty. Gere accounts for Schliemann and Nietzsche, as well as De Chirico, Freud, H.D., Graves, Gimbutas and Bernal, while laying out the story of the discovery, recreation, cultivation, and reception of the ruins of Knossos. This story fascinates in part because early Cretan civilization is perceived by generation after generation as a pacific, matriarchal Eden and as a foil to war after war (the War of Greek Independence, World War I, World War II, the Cold War). Gere does a great service too in showing how this peaceful utopia was a creation of archaeologists intentionally aggrandizing some pieces of evidence while relegating the bellicose others to the heap of forgotten history. After reading this book it is my opinion that Cathy Gere is an incredibly smart historian and a gorgeous writer. This book makes a very solid contribution as a cultural history of modernity and its biased cultivation of an idyllic past.
11 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Interesting Tour Guide
27 Sep 2009
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
To my luck, this book was released shortly before my planned vacation in Crete, site-not-to-be-missed being Knossos. The archeological museum was being renovated with only highlights on display. To my relief, the site was not as "restored" as the book might suggest. And most of the artifacts are not distorted either. (I do restoration for a living.) Given the overlays of interpretation of the Minoan remains (often contradictory), it was fascinating to hear the various licensed experts giving very often the same discredited spiel the author describes.
I thought this was a very good book on cultural history in the 20th cent, and the myth-making we often do with our archeology and ancient history. You can generalize this to most of the human sciences.
I thought this was a very good book on cultural history in the 20th cent, and the myth-making we often do with our archeology and ancient history. You can generalize this to most of the human sciences.
14 of 18 people found the following review helpful
Please Re-edit
24 July 2009
Format:Hardcover
This is indeed a brilliant examination of archaeological hopes and lies. What other reviewers fail to mention, however, is that the editing is horrible; it is astonishing that the superb University of Chicago Press can have sunk to this level. There are errors on almost every page: misspellings, faulty grammar, missing articles (as in "a" and "the"), poor punctuation (unnecessary commas, for example), and repeated redundancies (like "various different"). I have to give the book five stars, for the author's sake. Many of the mistakes must be hers, but it's the editor who should be truly embarrassed.
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