Review
Archaeologist Cathy Gere's wonderful little history/guidebook, "The Tomb of Agamemnon," is about a lot of things. It's about how each new era bends the past to its own needs. It's about what's gained--and lost--when scientists displace passionate amateurs. It's about the human desire to impose narrative, false if need be, on the mute relics of history. What Gere's book isn't about, strictly speaking, is the tomb of Agamemnon, because that doesn't exist...Still, lots of historical icons are fictional--George Washington's wooden teeth come to mind--and Gere spends a hundred or so lively, thought-provoking pages describing the "highly productive career" of this one... Unlikely as it seems, this book is a real page-turner. And if you like it, you're in luck. Gere's book is the latest in an ongoing series ÝWonders of the World on great monuments--Westminster Abbey, the Parthenon--published by Harvard University Press. Don't leave home without them. -- Joann C. Gutin "Newsday" (03/05/2006)
Product Description
From Homer to Himmler, from Thucydides to Freud, Mycenae has occupied a singular place in the western imagination. Gere takes us from the Cult of the Hero that sprung up in the shadow of the great burned walls in the eighth century BC, to Agamemnon's twentieth-century reincarnation as an Aryan military genius and to the distinctly anti-heroic conclusions of modern archaeology. The Wonders of the World is a series of books that focuses on some of the world's most famous sites or monuments. Their names will be familiar to almost everyone: they have achieved iconic stature and are loaded with a fair amount of mythological baggage. These monuments have been the subject of many books over the centuries, but our aim, through the skill and stature of the writers, is to get something much more enlightening, stimulating, even controversial, than straightforward histories or guides.
