Book description
The Iliad is still the greatest poem about war that our culture has
ever produced. For a hundred generations, poets and thinkers in the
West have pored over, retold and argued about the events described in
this martial epic, even when direct knowledge of it was lost. Various
empires have admired it as a book that in telling the story of the
siege of Troy also extols the warrior ethic, and teaches the young how
to die well. Yet the figure at the heart of the epic, the consummate
warrior Achilles, is a brooding, controversial hero. He is a fierce
critic of those who have started this war and allowed it to drag on,
consuming soldiers and civilians alike. Disconcertingly, The Iliad
portrays war as a catastrophe that destroys cities, orphans children
and wrecks whole societies. Caroline Alexander's extraordinary book is
not about any of the traditional concerns that have occupied
classicists for centuries. It is simpler and more radical than that.
In her words, 'This book is about what the Iliad is about; this book
is about what the Iliad says of war.'
Caroline Alexander is the author of The Mutiny on the Bounty and
The Endurance, a book about Shackleton's Antarctic expedition. She
writes for the New Yorker, National Geographic and Granta, among other
publications. Born and educated in Britain, she now lives in the USA.
