{"product_id":"why-homer-matters-a-history-9781627791793","title":"Why Homer Matters: A History","description":"\u003cp\u003e\"Adam Nicolson writes popular books as popular books used to be  a breeze rather than a scholarly sweat  but humanely erudite  elegantly written  passionately feltand his excitement is contagious.\"James Wood  The New Yorker  Adam Nicolson sees the Iliad and the Odyssey as the foundation myths of Greekand ourconsciousness  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.  Why Homer Matters 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. Homers 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.\"  The 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.  The 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":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45789777887285,"sku":"ByrdShop_1627791795","price":42.25,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9781627791793.jpg?v=1784698055","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/why-homer-matters-a-history-9781627791793","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}