{"product_id":"books-why-homer-matters-by-adam-nicolson","title":"Why Homer Matters","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eAdam Nicolson writes popular books as popular books used to be, a breeze rather than a scholarly sweat, but humanely erudite, elegantly written, passionately felt.and his excitement is contagious.--James Wood, \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAdam Nicolson sees the \u003ci\u003eIliad\u003c\/i\u003e and the \u003ci\u003eOdyssey\u003c\/i\u003e as the foundation myths of Greek--and our--consciousness, collapsing the passage of 4,000 years and making the distant past of the Mediterranean world as immediate to us as the events of our own time.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eWhy Homer Matters\u003c\/i\u003e is a magical journey of discovery across wide stretches of the past, sewn together by the poems themselves and their metaphors of life and trouble. Homer's poems occupy, as Adam Nicolson writes a third space in the way we relate to the past: not as memory, which lasts no more than three generations, nor as the objective accounts of history, but as epic, invented after memory but before history, poetry which aims to bind the wounds that time inflicts.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe Homeric poems are among the oldest stories we have, drawing on deep roots in the Eurasian steppes beyond the Black Sea, but emerging at a time around 2000 B.C. when the people who would become the Greeks came south and both clashed and fused with the more sophisticated inhabitants of the Eastern Mediterranean.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe poems, which ask the eternal questions about the individual and the community, honor and service, love and war, tell us how we became who we are.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"World of Books ","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53669398905105,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781627791793.jpg?v=1781508242","url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-gb\/products\/books-why-homer-matters-by-adam-nicolson","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}