|
Appearances
and Interviews | Reviews and Notices
Press
release
| Questions |
Cast of Characters
Reviews
and Notices
Scotsman
"Brilliant interweaving of the mythic and the modern,"
Parameters, Summer 2007
"a new way to look at a familiar story. It makes sense: the interpretation accounts for all the facts. It has the added benefit of being both interesting and readable."
The
Marine Corps Gazette
Barry Strauss pulls the Trojan War from the shadows of mythological ambiguity
and restores it firmly to bloody historical reality…. Strauss’
lively prose and inspired scholarship make this book an excellent read.
It is especially well suited to newcomers to classical historic studies.
For Marines, especially noncommissioned and company grade officers, his
examination of Bronze Age warfare provides great insight into war in general
and fighting men in particular.
about.com
Read carefully -- as it deserves to be, Barry Strauss' The Trojan
War: A New History is a goldmine of information on the Trojan War
and Bronze Age in Greece, Egypt, and the ancient Near East. It would also
work well as a companion to the Iliad. The language is often moving and
always clear.
Seth
Cropsey, “Homer’s
Greek Epic Offers Leadership Lessons for Modern Officers,” in
Armed Forces Journal
Homer's "Iliad," the first great work of western civilization,
is a rich and complex tale of anger, fate, war, humanity, and what we
can, and cannot, hope to know, or control. It is also a commentary on
wartime leadership, and on the virtues and vices of commanders. The subject
of command is close to the poem's core. However, before looking at what
Homer thinks about command, modern readers must appreciate how thoroughly
practical is his understanding of war. The fog of scholarship needs lifting
to see this
....
With few exceptions, such as Barry Strauss' recent "The Trojan War:
A New History," academic research on Homer nowadays often looks at
his work as merely a key to the world from which it came. Less important
in learned writing is the possibility that the "Iliad" survived
over the centuries because its understanding of men and conflict is universal.
Pick
of the Month (February 2007), History Book Club, Cornerstone
Books, Salem MA
Victor
Davis Hanson in The New Criterion
To pull off such a radical new take on the Trojan War requires three things:
scholarly expertise that allows intimate knowledge of the Greek text of
Homer, along with familiarity with thousands of scholarly books and articles
that frame the age-old Homeric question of authenticity; a writer’s
flair for imagery and engaging prose; and a most non-academic willingness
to experiment and endure pedantic criticism from fellow scholars who will
resent such popularization and speculation.
We
are fortunate that Barry Strauss possesses all three gifts, and the result
is that his Trojan War really is a “new history”
that is as different as it is welcome.
The
News & Observer (Raleigh-Durham, NC)
Strauss finds plenty of modern connection to this ancient war. Like so
many nations before and since, the Greeks turned to war abroad in part
to take the focus off unrest at home. Strauss finds another eternal lesson
-- that victory often costs as much as defeat -- in noting Greece's collapse
after its triumph over Troy.
The
Harvard Book Review
It is this talent for getting to the universal truths beneath the myths
that makes Strauss's account such a fine read. His tone is invitational,
beseeching us to imagine this scene, to consider this situation or to
meet this character. Reading the book becomes almost an interactive experience,
as Strauss draws the outlines of his own imaginings and leaves it to his
readers to fill in the gaps on their own. His prose is fluid and absorbing,
his historical background fascinating but carefully chosen so as not to
be overwhelming. His passion for the subject is evident in his writing,
and in asking us to picture the war in all its horrifying splendor, he
is also asking that we share in his excitement.
Charleston
Post-Courier
…a remarkable and readable job of allowing us to see the Trojan
War, not only from the perspective of finding out what really happened,
a difficult task considering the paucity of specific period sources, but
from the viewpoint of the era in which it occurred.
…bring[s] to historical life one of the greatest stories ever told.
Olsson’s
2006 Holiday Gift Guide
Barry Strauss’s acclaimed Battle of Salamis singled him out as a
superb scholar who could also write engagingly. Here he melds the heroes
of Homer’s Iliad with current
knowledge of Bronze Age warfare to present a vivid picture of a 1200 BCE
clash between the Trojan Hittites and the marauding Greeks.
Biblical
Archaeology Society
Cornell University professor Barry Strauss brings a new perspective based
on new research and scholarship to the study of the ancient war, whether
it happened the way the story has come down to us and its importance to
the study of Greece in the Bronze Age and history as a whole.
Military
Book Club Selection
A “hot book”: No one is more suited to tell the most up-to-date
version of the Trojan War than Barry Strauss, one of the foremost scholars
on the subject. Part historian, part classicist, Strauss possesses equal
appreciation for cold hard facts and dynamic storytelling.
Book-of-the
Month Club Selection
“A new history of the Trojan War, written by an esteemed military
scholar, that re-creates the war as vividly as a first-rate historical
novel.”
Orson
Scott Card
“…Barry Strauss's wonderful book The Trojan War.
Strauss combines all the literary sources about the events of the war,
and then compares them with the archaeological record, which has been
growing clearer by leaps and bounds in recent decades.”
Quoted
in The
Chronicle of Higher Education, Thursday, November 9, 2006
(subscription required)
The ancient city of Troy has captured the imagination of academics and
the general public alike for thousands of years, thanks in large part
to the ancient poet Homer's account of the Trojan War in The Iliad.
That rooting of the story in poetry, rather than archaeological evidence,
has led to a contentious approach to Troy that begs the question of who
owns history, says Barry Strauss, a professor of history and classics
at Cornell University.
The
Wichita Eagle: "The Trojan War: A New History is
an eminently approachable slice of popular history that will give any
reader a clear understanding of the Bronze Age world, its cultural preoccupations,
social mores and military techniques.”
The
Rutland (Vt.) Herald
“The Trojan War, or at least the age in which it is supposed to
have taken place, is thousands of years in the past, but a new book about
it has just been published, and it gives some interesting background to
those times.”
The
Capitol Tribune
“Scholarship on Homer is wide and deep. There is no shortage of
analysis and opinion about Homer’s epic poem. … the difference
with Barry's book seems to be the up-to-date research and the skill of
his story telling. Barry is a gifted writer.”
History
Book Club Main Selection
Review by Thomas R. Martin
Barry Strauss, one of the most imaginative scholars writing today on ancient
military history, has now produced a new history of the Trojan War that
presents the latest evidence from the perspective of a researcher who
has walked the terrain of Troy and analyzed the vast amount of recent
scholarship on the topic. To top it all off, he presents the results of
his investigation in an especially engaging fashion, enlivening his authoritative
narrative with compelling passages recreating the war as vividly as a
first-rate historical novel. more....
From
Booklist
Classics professor Strauss has demonstrated talent for popular history
writing (The Battle of Salamis, 2004) that continues with this rendition
of the granddaddy of Western literature. Homer's Iliad, acknowledges Strauss,
has been regarded skeptically as a record of a real war, but he pitches
the epic as credible in its fundamental narrative of a Greek naval force
landing and sacking Troy around 1200 BCE. Although he concedes that the
Iliad's characters are likely fictional, Strauss adopts the device of
treating them as real, modified in light of the Bronze Age's practice
of diplomacy and warfare as interpreted through archaeology, fragmentary
ancient writings, and the Iliad and the Odyssey. So, neither a titanic
war instigated by Paris' abduction of Helen, nor champions such as Achilles
and Hector, nor the war's culmination in the subterfuge of the Trojan
Horse are necessarily far-fetched notions in Strauss' telling. Combining
caution with a stretch of historical imagination, Strauss' depiction of
the Trojan War yields a conflict shorn of the Iliad's heroizing but restored
with historically plausible causes, chronologies, and conclusions. Gilbert
Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Library
Journal
Most readers are familiar with the Bronze Age conflict known as the Trojan
War from having read Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey, which date from
many centuries after the actual events occurred. Several recently published
books, however, examine newly revealed evidence-e.g., from ancient Hittite
archives-and lend credence to Homer's description of the battles and the
Aegean-area culture. What distinguishes this book from its competitors,
among them Joachim Latacz's Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old
Mystery, is that Strauss (history & classics, Cornell Univ.; The Battle
of Salamis) takes the reader step by step from the beginning of the conflict
through the end, analyzing with the latest archaeological evidence Homer's
depictions of war preparations, the war itself, and the aftermath. Well
written and researched, this book is recommended for academic and large
public libraries.-Sean Fleming, Lebanon P.L., NH Copyright 2006 Reed Business
Information.
|
