A young man is taken from Greece to work in Germany as a slave laborer during World War II. He experiences first-hand tribulations and humiliating treatment in war-time Germany, the defeat of Hitler's regime, life as a displaced person in various refugee camps, and eventual immigration to the United States. The characters portrayed in this historical novel include Jews whose families perished in Nazi concentration camps, a Russian aristocrat working as a chef in Switzerland, an Italian black market businessman working as a waiter, Germans who are decent and generous, American soldiers in occupied Germany and others. A range of human feelings--fear, humiliation, hunger, hatred, love, sex, compassion, and most of all hope--are dealt with in this novel.
Two journalists embarking on a year's adventure in Greece just as the country faces economic collapse seems foolhardy—but it's their decision to bring their crazy Jack Russell to a crisis-weary country with zero dog tolerance that tips the plan into actual madnessAfter an Arctic winter, a recession, and a downturn in the newspaper industry, two journalists and their dog embark on an adventure in the wild and beautiful southern Peloponnese. A perfect plan, except for one thing—Greece is deep in economic crisis. And if fiscal failure can't overturn the couple's escapade in rural Greece, perhaps macabre local customs, a scorpion invasion, zero dog-tolerance, health scares, and touchy expats will. This is a humorous and insightful journey through one of the last unspoiled regions of Greece. It is full of encounters with warm-hearted, often eccentric, Greeks who show that this troubled country still has heroes, if not euros. In a hillside village in the Mani, the locals share their lives, their laughter, and their stories, and help chart the couple's own passage back to happiness. They even find a place in their hearts for their Greek nemesis—the local pungent goat cheese. Things really can only get feta.
A Greek Odyssey in the American West begins with Helen Papanikolas discussing her childhood in Helper, Utah. Helper’s population was as odd a conglomeration as could be found anywhere in the West: French sheepherders; Chinese and Japanese restaurant owners; African American, Greek, and Italian rail and coal workers; and finally, Mormon, Jewish, and Slav businessmen settled in and around Helper, a way station for the Denver and Rio Grande Western railroad. This book, however, is not Papanikolas’s life story but the story of her parent’s individual emigrations to the United States, their meeting and courtship, and their migrations within the West as they pursued job opportunities. Papanikolas movingly and eloquently recreates and interprets the experience of parents trying hard to succeed in America without losing their rich heritage and who ultimately enrich the culture of their adopted country.
Since their composition almost 3,000 years ago the Homeric epics have lost none of their power to grip audiences and fire the imagination: with their stories of life and death, love and loss, war and peace they continue to speak to us at the deepest level about who we are across the span of generations. That being said, the world of Homer is in many ways distant from that in which we live today, with fundamental differences not only in language, social order, and religion, but in basic assumptions about the world and human nature. This volume offers a detailed yet accessible introduction to ancient Greek culture through the lens of Book One of the Odyssey, covering all of these aspects and more in a comprehensive Introduction designed to orient students in their studies of Greek literature and history. The full Greek text is included alongside a facing English translation which aims to reproduce as far as feasible the word order and sound play of the Greek original and is supplemented by a Glossary of Technical Terms and a full vocabulary keyed to the specific ways that words are used in Odyssey I. At the heart of the volume is a full-length line-by-line commentary, the first in English since the 1980s and updated to bring the latest scholarship to bear on the text: focusing on philological and linguistic issues, its close engagement with the original Greek yields insights that will be of use to scholars and advanced students as well as to those coming to the text for the first time.
The Iliad: Join Achilles at the Gates of Troy as he slays Hector to Avenge the death of Patroclus. Here is a story of love and war, hope and despair, and honor and glory. The recent major motion picture Helen of Troy staring Brad Pitt proves that this epic is as relevant today as it was twenty five hundred years ago when it was first written. So journey back to the Trojan War with Homer and relive the grandest adventure of all times. The Odyssey: Journey with Ulysses as he battles to bring his victorious, but decimated, troops home from the Trojan War, dogged by the wrath of the god Poseidon at every turn. Having been away for twenty years, little does he know what awaits him when he finally makes his way home. These two books are some of the most import books in the literary cannon, having influenced virtually every adventure tale ever told. And yet they are still accessible and immediate and now you can have both in one binding.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE 2017 SHORTLISTED FOR THE LONDON HELLENIC PRIZE 2017 WINNER OF THE PRIX MÉDITERRANÉE 2018 From the award-winning, best-selling writer: a deeply moving tale of a father and son’s transformative journey in reading – and reliving – Homer’s epic masterpiece.
A memoir, biography, work of history, and literary criticism all in one, this moving book tells the story of three exiled writers—Erich Auerbach, François Fénelon, and W. G. Sebald—and their relationship with the classics, from Homer to Mimesis. In a genre-defying book hailed as “exquisite” (The New York Times) and “spectacular” (The Times Literary Supplement), the best-selling memoirist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn explores the mysterious links between the randomness of the lives we lead and the artfulness of the stories we tell. Combining memoir, biography, history, and literary criticism, Three Rings weaves together the stories of three exiled writers who turned to the classics of the past to create masterpieces of their own—works that pondered the nature of narrative itself: Erich Auerbach, the Jewish philologist who fled Hitler’s Germany and wrote his classic study of Western literature, Mimesis, in Istanbul; François Fénelon, the seventeenth-century French archbishop whose ingenious sequel to the Odyssey, The Adventures of Telemachus—a veiled critique of the Sun King and the best-selling book in Europe for a hundred years—resulted in his banishment; and the German novelist W.G. Sebald, self-exiled to England, whose distinctively meandering narratives explore Odyssean themes of displacement, nostalgia, and separation from home. Intertwined with these tales of exile and artistic crisis is an account of Mendelsohn’s struggle to write two of his own books—a family saga of the Holocaust and a memoir about reading the Odyssey with his elderly father—that are haunted by tales of oppression and wandering. As Three Rings moves to its startling conclusion, a climactic revelation about the way in which the lives of its three heroes were linked across borders, languages, and centuries forces the reader to reconsider the relationship between narrative and history, art and life.
Take a culinary journey through Greece in All You Can Greek with Eleni Saltas, a blogger with a flair for Greek food, life, and travel. Eleni knows the power of oregano, olive oil, history, and friendship- just a few key ingredients that bring these approachable and traditional Greek recipes to life. A cookbook that also lists the best beaches and monasteries in Greece? Yes! Eleni blendstrue life tales and Greek spirit with the flavors of Greece so that you, too, will feelwhat it means to live andlove like a Greek.
