Road to Delphi Ancient Greece Oracles Xerxes Oedipus Dodona Aeschylus, Sophocles

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Road to Delphi Ancient Greece Oracles Xerxes Oedipus Dodona Aeschylus, Sophocles:
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The Road to Delphi: The Life and Afterlife of Oracles by Michael Wood.

DESCRIPTION: Hardback with Dust Jacket: 271 pages. Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; (2003). In this fascinating and highly original book Michael Wood combines vivid story-telling and acutely perceptive analysis to give a sympathetic and entertaining account of humanity\'s persistent belief in \'signs\'. He begins with the oracles of ancient Greece, explaining how people consulted them when they had to make crucial choices. Yet the key point was that the oracles spoke in riddles and gave ambiguous answers, it was up to humans to interpret what they said. Like horoscopes today, this allowed the hearers to fit the message to what they wanted, and sometimes, as in the disastrous tale of the Persian general Xerxes, or in the great drama of Oedipus and the riddle of the Sphinx, and much later in Shakespeare\'s tale of Macbeth and the witches\' prophesy, the listeners have got things horribly wrong.

Michael Wood does not only look at Europe, he considers oracles in the old civilizations of the East, and particularly in pre-Hispanic America. He also explores modern examples, like the puzzles in the Kafka\'s fiction. And he brings the story up into our own lives, examining oracles in the film The Matrix and looking at the way we \'interpret\' authorities we don\'t quite understand, as in the doctor\'s consulting room, or avidly puzzle out the meaning of astrology columns of the press. Lively, engaging and revealing, full of warmth and humanity as well as scholarship, \"The Road to Delphi\" is a book that sticks in the mind. It is remarkable both for the stories it tells, and the way it makes us think again about our dangerous longing to trust in signs - just as long as we have that tiny bit of freedom to twist them to promise what we hope for.

CONDITION: Remainder mark on bottom, otherwise unread and New.

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PLEASE SEE PUBLISHER, PROFESSIONAL, AND READER REVIEWS BELOW.

PUBLISHER REVIEW:

REVIEW: For thousands of years, and in many different cultures, cities, and states, individuals have consulted oracles in time of need. In this fascinating exploration of the history and enduring popularity of oracles, Michael Wood examines how they are interpreted and why. The inherent ambiguity of many oracular pronouncements and the ingenuity and tendentiousness of many readings of them form the basis for Wood\'s analyses of oracles, both real and imagined. Using examples from actual oracles at Delphi, Dodona, and in pre-Hispanic America to fictional, but influential oracles in literature from Oedipus to Macbeth, Wood combines storytelling and commentary to provide an entertaining and concise account of humanity\'s persistent faith in signs.

He also looks at later instances of oracles, arguing that consultations have evolved in many ways over the years, and that echoes and survivals of old practices in modern literature and popular culture, in the works of Kafka and in the film \"The Matrix\", as well as in astrology columns, continue to exert an important influence over human civilization. Lively, engaging, and remarkably revealing, \"The Road to Delphi\" shows an ancient art at work in many times and places, and invites us to think again about the ways in which we deal with our longing for the certainties we know we can\'t have.

Michael Wood was born in Lincoln, England, and educated at Cambridge University. He was a Research Fellow at St. John\'s College, Cambridge, and has taught at Columbia University in New York and at Exeter University in England. Currently he is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton. He has written books on Stendhal, Garcia Marquez, Nabokov, Kafka, and on contemporary fiction in Europe and the Americas. He also writes on film and is the author of six previous books including \"America in the Movies\" and a recent monograph on Luis Bunuel\'s \"Belle de Jour\". He is a regular contributor to \"The New York Review of Books\" and \"The London Review of Books\".

PROFESSIONAL REVIEWS:

REVIEW: The oracular tradition is an immensely rich and provocative subject, and literary critic Wood\'s wide-ranging and penetrating scrutiny is cogently philosophical, keenly aesthetic, and gratifyingly entertaining. The allure of oracle stories resides in the fact that ambiguity and skepticism are intrinsic to the proceedings. The pronouncements of oracles tend to take the form of unsolvable riddles and puns. As Wood ponders the perverse inscrutability of prophecies, he wonders if fate is escapable, muses over \"our need for stories of equivocation,\" and places \"the labor of interpretation\" high among humankind\'s most persistent habits of being. The story of Oedipus is Wood\'s touchstone, and he adeptly parses an array of interpretations from the classics to the work of Stravinsky. He traces the fate of oracles after Christ, analyzes the role of oracles in Shakespeare and Kafka, then delves into such lesser yet nonetheless effective vehicles as \"The Matrix\". What emerges most poignantly from Wood\'s imaginative and learned inquiry is a renewed appreciation of our species\' creativity and contrariness, and the universal and timeless power of stories.

REVIEW: The oracle\'s enduring presence in literature, film, and popular culture, assessed by Wood (Professor of English at Princeton University) as a historical and cultural phenomenon. There\'s a little something for everyone here. The author provides learned, sometimes challenging discussions of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Milton. He alludes to \"The Matrix\", Bob Dylan, W. C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, films both popular (Minority Report) and otherwise (Throne of blood). He offers revisionist and even generous considerations of the daily horoscope, Nostradamus, and your primary-care physician. Wood begins by wondering why the idea of oracles has lingered in so many cultures since its origins in, as nearly as he can tell, Greece in the eighth century B.C. He considers the centrality of the notion of gods in the oracular tradition; (\"All things are full of gods, even if they are often figurative, and these gods talk all the time\") and explains how the oracles worked: communication with a god, then a generally ambiguous reply or prediction or warning.

Wood distinguishes carefully among the various sorts of predicting entities and their intermediaries, giving a particularly interesting analysis of sibyls and a lovely riff on the sound of sibylline. Examining Cassandra, best known of all sibyls, he chronicles the cursed princess\'s appearances in myths and in Christa Wolf\'s 1984 novel, \"Cassandra\". The author wonders (with Wittgenstein, whom he considers at length) about certainty, which he concludes has both \"appalling attractions and alluring dangers\". Wood sees astrology as a harmless, playful pastime for people who don\'t bother to ask about the process astrologers use to arrive at their generally genial pronouncements. And he tells a couple of brief, wrenching personal medical stories, one about a brother-in-law who died, another about his own son, who lived. Sometimes erudite, sometimes esoteric, always unpredictable.

REVIEW: Wood (Professor of English, Princeton) assesses the history of oracles in literature, drama, film, myth, and popular culture in this thorough examination of God\'s messengers. Plato, Shakespeare, Mann, Tolstoy, Freud, and Kafka are just a few of the authors whose oracular references Wood explicates. He spends a great deal of time discussing Oedipus, the Bible, the Greek heroine Cassandra, and the movie The Matrix, arguing that oracles play on our hopes and fears. Are the prophecies of oracles always right? Did oracles disappear with the birth of Christ? Why do oracles sometimes speak in riddles or use ambiguous language? Wood answers these questions with sweeping coverage across various cultures, religions, and time periods. An extensive bibliography is included. If Wood didn\'t write with such clarity and modest good sense, one might regard his range as a bit show-offy. As it is, \"The Road to Delphi\" seems elegantly European, the sort of essay a Roland Barthes might turn out or a Roberto Calasso.

REVIEW: Finding that oracles present prediction seekers with equivocations, ambiguities and \"amphibologies,\" Princeton English professor Wood guides those looking for the future through the forms oracles have taken. Reading more like transcribed lectures than a composed text, the book hops, skips and sometimes trudges through oracular moments in history, literature, theater and film. Stops include Shakespeare; the Oxford English Dictionary; Wittgenstein; Nietzsche; etymology, anthropology; doctors; economic advisers; Macbeth\'s encounter with three oracles and Oedipus\'s experience with the Delphic one-via Sophocles\' and Euripides\' plays, Stravinsky\'s opera, Passolini\'s movie, Freud\'s analysis and Gjertrud Schnackenberg\'s poetry.

Then come sibyls, the oracles\' \"most famous cousins,\" but with Milton\'s poetry we arrive at \"the sudden and total death of oracles at the birth of Christ\"-though the oracular lives on in The Matrix and elsewhere. Throughout, Wood, who reviews regularly for the New York Review of Books and London Review of Books, plays professorial cat-and-mouse: \"The idiom makes perfect sense, and I have just used it six times, I hope unobtrusively.\" (Question implied-can you find it?) Sometimes he cozies up: \"No success like failure, as Bob Dylan used to moan, and these paradoxes are apt to make your head spin.\" As might Wood\'s multiple references and tepid games, if they were not designed to remind us that \"our choices are choices, and that not even an oracle can take this freedom from us\".

REVIEW: In this lively and engaging work, an erudite, eloquent, and wide-ranging examination of oracles is offered by one of the world\'s most creative literary critics. Wood, who teaches English at Princeton, is not a true believer. He is an amiable skeptic with a soft spot for the oracular utterances of astrologers. But in \"The Road to Delphi\", his erudite romp through the history of oracles, from the ancients to the soothsaying economists and physicians of our own time, Wood finds a beautifully clear picture of the complex mechanics of mythmaking and a helpful explication of the tangle of human desire and interpretation. If not an oracular pronouncement, then a source of terrific and myriad pleasures. Michael Wood\'s \"The Road to Delphi\" is all that and then some.

READER REVIEWS:

REVIEW: This is an enjoyable book, one which can be read straight through or left at one end of the sofa and picked up and continued when the mood strikes one; or when the omens are promising. The author is learned and writes gracefully, evoking an earlier age, or many earlier ages, when literary critics and scholars wrote lucid, elegant, and insightful prose for their peers as well as for the educated, or simply the interested general reader. I won\'t say much about the topic, oracles, except to say that we homo sapiens seem to have a rather persistent propensity to be afflicted by oracle-ism: a kind of prophetic wisdom, at odds with commonsensical or empirical knowledge, and therefore acquired on the cheap. And convincing because it implies a flattering interest in us by significant powers.

REVIEW: Explores history and popularity of oracles, how they are interpreted and why. Using examples drawn from actual oracles that existed at Delphi, Dodona, and elsewhere; and from fictional, but influential oracles in literature from Oedipus to Macbeth, Wood combines storytelling and commentary to provide an entertaining and concise account of humanity\'s persistent faith in signs. He also looks at later instances of oracles, arguing that consultations have evolved in many ways over the years, and that echoes and survivals of old practices in modern literature and popular culture, in the works of Kafka and Proust and in the films \"The Matrix\" and \"Minority Report\", as well as in astrology columns, continue to exert an important influence over human civilization.

REVIEW: A history of oracles considers such examples as the oracles at Delphi, pre-Hispanic America, and in works of fiction and popular culture, offering insight into humanity\'s beliefs about signs and astrology while noting the influence of oracles over civilization. Combines vivid storytelling and perceptive analysis to give a sympathetic and entertaining account of humanity\'s persistent belief in \'signs\'.

REVIEW: We may think that consulting oracles was an activity that died out many hundreds of years ago but, as Michael Wood demonstrates, there are many different types of oracle, both past and present, existing in many different cultures. This book is a collection of stories and commentaries from a wide variety of sources, although inevitably there is much discussion of the ancient Greco-Roman world. In it, Wood examines what an oracle is and how they perform.

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