Confronting the Classics

Confronting the Classics PDF Author: Mary Beard
Publisher: Profile Books
ISBN: 1847658881
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
Mary Beard is one of the world's best-known classicists - a brilliant academic, with a rare gift for communicating with a wide audience both though her TV presenting and her books. In a series of sparkling essays, she explores our rich classical heritage - from Greek drama to Roman jokes, introducing some larger-than-life characters of classical history, such as Alexander the Great, Nero and Boudicca. She invites you into the places where Greeks and Romans lived and died, from the palace at Knossos to Cleopatra's Alexandria - and reveals the often hidden world of slaves. She takes a fresh look at both scholarly controversies and popular interpretations of the ancient world, from The Golden Bough to Asterix. The fruit of over thirty years in the world of classical scholarship, Confronting the Classics captures the world of antiquity and its modern significance with wit, verve and scholarly expertise.

Confronting the Classics

Confronting the Classics PDF Author: Mary Beard
Publisher: Profile Books
ISBN: 1847658881
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 383

Get Book

Book Description
Mary Beard is one of the world's best-known classicists - a brilliant academic, with a rare gift for communicating with a wide audience both though her TV presenting and her books. In a series of sparkling essays, she explores our rich classical heritage - from Greek drama to Roman jokes, introducing some larger-than-life characters of classical history, such as Alexander the Great, Nero and Boudicca. She invites you into the places where Greeks and Romans lived and died, from the palace at Knossos to Cleopatra's Alexandria - and reveals the often hidden world of slaves. She takes a fresh look at both scholarly controversies and popular interpretations of the ancient world, from The Golden Bough to Asterix. The fruit of over thirty years in the world of classical scholarship, Confronting the Classics captures the world of antiquity and its modern significance with wit, verve and scholarly expertise.

Confronting the Classics

Confronting the Classics PDF Author: Mary Beard
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781781250495
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Mary Beard is one of the world's best-known classicists - a brilliant academic, with a rare gift for communicating with a wide audience both though her books and TV presenting.In a series of sparkling essays, she explores our rich classical heritage - from Greek drama to Roman jokes, introducing some larger-than-life characters of classical history, such as Alexander the Great, Nero and Boudicca. She invites you into the places where Greeks and Romans lived and died, from the palace at Knossos to Cleopatra's Alexandria - and reveals the often hidden world of slaves. She brings back to life some of the greatest writers of antiquity - including Thucydides, Cicero and Tacitus - and takes a fresh look at both scholarly controversies and popular interpretations of the ancient world, from The Golden Bough to Asterix. The fruit of over thirty years in the world of classical scholarship, Confronting the Classics captures the world of antiquity and its modern significance with wit, verve and scholarly expertise.

It's a Don's Life

It's a Don's Life PDF Author: Mary Beard
Publisher: Profile Books
ISBN: 1847652468
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Mary Beard's by now famous blog A Don's Life has been running on the TLS website for nearly three years. In it she has made her name as a wickedly subversive commentator on the world in which we live. Her central themes are the classics, universities and teaching -- and much else besides. What are academics for? Who was the first African Roman emperor? Looting -- ancient and modern. Are modern exams easier? Keep lesbos for the lesbians. Did St Valentine exist? What made the Romans laugh? That is just a small taste of this selection (and some of the choicer responses) which will inform, occasionally provoke and cannot fail to entertain.

The Invention of Jane Harrison

The Invention of Jane Harrison PDF Author: Mary Beard
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674008076
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928) is the most famous female Classicist in history, the author of books that revolutionized our understanding of Greek culture and religion. This lively and innovative portrayal of a fascinating woman raises the question of who wins (and how) in the competition for academic fame.

Laughter in Ancient Rome

Laughter in Ancient Rome PDF Author: Mary Beard
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520401492
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
What made the Romans laugh? Was ancient Rome a carnival, filled with practical jokes and hearty chuckles? Or was it a carefully regulated culture in which the uncontrollable excess of laughter was a force to fear—a world of wit, irony, and knowing smiles? How did Romans make sense of laughter? What role did it play in the world of the law courts, the imperial palace, or the spectacles of the arena? Laughter in Ancient Rome explores one of the most intriguing, but also trickiest, of historical subjects. Drawing on a wide range of Roman writing—from essays on rhetoric to a surviving Roman joke book—Mary Beard tracks down the giggles, smirks, and guffaws of the ancient Romans themselves. From ancient “monkey business” to the role of a chuckle in a culture of tyranny, she explores Roman humor from the hilarious, to the momentous, to the surprising. But she also reflects on even bigger historical questions. What kind of history of laughter can we possibly tell? Can we ever really “get” the Romans’ jokes?

The Fires of Vesuvius

The Fires of Vesuvius PDF Author: Mary Beard
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674744411
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
Pompeii is the most famous archaeological site in the world, visited by more than two million people each year. Yet it is also one of the most puzzling, with an intriguing and sometimes violent history, from the sixth century BCE to the present day. Destroyed by Vesuvius in 79 CE, the ruins of Pompeii offer the best evidence we have of life in the Roman Empire. But the eruptions are only part of the story. In The Fires of Vesuvius, acclaimed historian Mary Beard makes sense of the remains. She explores what kind of town it was—more like Calcutta or the Costa del Sol?—and what it can tell us about “ordinary” life there. From sex to politics, food to religion, slavery to literacy, Beard offers us the big picture even as she takes us close enough to the past to smell the bad breath and see the intestinal tapeworms of the inhabitants of the lost city. She resurrects the Temple of Isis as a testament to ancient multiculturalism. At the Suburban Baths we go from communal bathing to hygiene to erotica. Recently, Pompeii has been a focus of pleasure and loss: from Pink Floyd’s memorable rock concert to Primo Levi’s elegy on the victims. But Pompeii still does not give up its secrets quite as easily as it may seem. This book shows us how much more and less there is to Pompeii than a city frozen in time as it went about its business on 24 August 79.

All in a Don's Day

All in a Don's Day PDF Author: Mary Beard
Publisher: Profile Books
ISBN: 1847658636
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
Her central themes are the classics, universities and teaching - and much else besides. In this second collection following on from the success of It's a Don's Life, Beard ponders whether Gaddafi's home is Roman or not, we share her 'terror of humiliation' as she enters 'hairdresser country' and follow her dilemma as she wanders through the quandary of illegible handwriting on examination papers and 'longing for the next dyslexic' - on whose paper the answers are typed, not handwritten. Praise for It's a Don's Life 'Delightful... it has the virtues of brevity, eclecticism and learning worn lightly... if they'd had Mary Beard on their side back then, the Romans would still have their empire' Daily Mail

Vial 023: A Father's Pursuit of Justice

Vial 023: A Father's Pursuit of Justice PDF Author: Gary William Cross
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781938624131
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Book Description
When Gary Cross and his wife learned that their baby son Brad had hemophilia, it seemed like a relatively small bump in the road of their American dream family life. Medicine would make it all manageable. But the Crosses did not know the shots they were giving Brad for his condition carried a deadly virus. As AIDS began to dominate the headlines, Gary started to doubt the doctors' assurances that everything was OK with Brad's treatment. And his demand for answers brought to light disturbing revelations: Thousands of hemophiliacs like Brad had been infected with HIV because the blood used for their clotting factor injections came from high-risk donor groups. While caring for his ailing son, Gary embarked on a campaign for justice for Brad and the thousands like him. His efforts took him from the courtrooms to the steps of the Capitol in Washington D.C. The Crosses' heartbreaking personal story was broadcast nationally on CBS' 60 Minutes. After more than a decade, Gary's crusade ended not in court or in government chambers but in a Los Angeles hotel, where with other leaders in the hemophilia community he brokered a remarkable peace settlement with the pharmaceutical companies whose products had killed. This is his story.

In the Name of Rome

In the Name of Rome PDF Author: Adrian Goldsworthy
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300221835
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 490

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Book Description
A definitive history of the great commanders of ancient Rome, from bestselling author Adrian Goldsworthy. “In his elegantly accessible style, Goldsworthy offers gripping and swiftly erudite accounts of Roman wars and the great captains who fought them. His heroes are never flavorless and generic, but magnificently Roman. And it is especially Goldsworthy's vision of commanders deftly surfing the giant, irresistible waves of Roman military tradition, while navigating the floating logs, reefs, and treacherous sandbanks of Roman civilian politics, that makes the book indispensable not only to those interested in Rome and her battles, but to anyone who finds it astounding that military men, at once driven and imperiled by the odd and idiosyncratic ways of their societies, can accomplish great deeds.” —J. E. Lendon, author of Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity

Mysteries of the Life Force

Mysteries of the Life Force PDF Author: Peter Meech
Publisher: Sentient Publications
ISBN: 1591810558
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
By turns suspenseful, philosophical, and humorous, this book chronicles the first seven years of an extraordinary apprenticeship in Toronto between a young man and a celebrated chi kung master from Shanghai. Many astonishing events occurred, such as frequent telepathic exchanges between master and student, the throwing of chi-energy over great distances, and at least one instance of what could be called Jedi mind control, right out of the movie Star Wars.