Mary Lefkowitz is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Department of Classical Studies, Wellesley College. She has taught a highly popular introductory Greek mythology course for more than twenty-five years and has written extensively on ancient history and mythology. Among her books is Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History, which led to appearances on national radio talk shows and on 60 Minutes as well as to interviews in the Boston Globe and the Washington Post.
"direct, lucid... informative and fluently readable" Stephen Halliwell, Times Literary Supplement; "A great success... Acute and fascinating." Jasper Griffin, New York Review of Books; "The excellent scholar Mary Lefkowitz briskly retells some of the classic myths, not only from Homer, Hesiod, and Greek tragedy, but also those to do with the voyage of the Argonauts and the adventures of Virgil's Aeneas." Peter Green, Los Angeles Times Book Review; "From a super-competent, sometimes controversial, and always engaging professional classicist, a fascinating study." Tracy Lee Simmons, Washington Post"
"direct, lucid... informative and fluently readable" Stephen Halliwell, Times Literary Supplement; "A great success... Acute and fascinating." Jasper Griffin, New York Review of Books; "The excellent scholar Mary Lefkowitz briskly retells some of the classic myths, not only from Homer, Hesiod, and Greek tragedy, but also those to do with the voyage of the Argonauts and the adventures of Virgil's Aeneas." Peter Green, Los Angeles Times Book Review; "From a super-competent, sometimes controversial, and always engaging professional classicist, a fascinating study." Tracy Lee Simmons, Washington Post"
The many readers of Wellesley College professor Lefkowitz's book Not Out of Africa (1996) discovered what her academic colleagues had known for decades-she has an encyclopedic grasp of classical literature and a knack for lucid if austere prose. But where that book addressed the intensely contemporary issue of Afrocentrism, this one takes a more Olympian perspective. Twentieth-century interpreters from Freud to Joseph Campbell plumbed Greek myths for their insights into human character, but Lefkowitz suggests the myths have something to say about divinity itself. Is it possible that Greeks actually believed in their pantheon of flawed and fallible gods, with their deceptions, adulteries and petty quarrels? Lefkowitz insists that we take that possibility seriously. She offers chapter-long retellings of texts like the Iliad and the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, showing how central the gods are to those texts. (Unfortunately, readers not already familiar with Greek literature may struggle to keep up.) The gods, she says, are distant and only rarely interested in individual mortals, and divine justice moves slowly. Yet for Lefkowitz this "religion for adults" is commendably realistic, delivering little comfort "other than the satisfaction that comes from understanding what it is to be human." (Nov.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
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