Stories from Plato and Other Classic Writers Hesiod Homer Aristophanes Ovid Catullus and Pliny Mary E Burt 9781514639085 Books
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The interior of this book is a facsimile reproduction of a rare book published in Boston, by Ginn & Company, in 1895. Search similar books with the keyword hcbooks.
Stories from Plato and Other Classic Writers Hesiod Homer Aristophanes Ovid Catullus and Pliny Mary E Burt 9781514639085 Books
My little boy has been exposed to a fair bit of philosophy, since my own training was in that subject. I was looking for another philosophy book after we read The Little Book of Big Questions. I got this book thinking it might have a significant amount of Plato's philosophy in it. It has only a tiny bit of recognizable moral philosophy. Most of the selections are myths, and indeed 90-95% of this book is myth. Of course, like all myth, the stories had plenty of moralistic elements, but that's different from moral philosophy.Qua myth, this is a rather disappointing collection to me. My son has read a lot of myth, too, and he enjoyed this. First, I can't say that I like this writer much. She goes into great detail on relatively trivial points and leaves development of the main action/theme threadbare. On a couple of occasions Burt repeats the same myth, in a different way, from one chapter to the next, as if she had forgotten to take out one of the versions. Maybe there is a pedagogical reason for this, but I'm not so sure. As for those myths that I recognized (about half of them), quite a few seemed to have significant details changed.
Primitive explanations of phenomena are presented in the author's voice, or when it isn't clear whether she's speaking for herself or on behalf of the myth source. Of course, there's nothing wrong with giving primitive explanations of phenomena in a book of myth--that's what a lot of myth is about, after all--but there is something wrong, and annoying, in writing daft (Burt's introduction uses the word "poetic") stuff that isn't clearly presented as myth.
Similarly backwards is the gratuitous nineteenth-century moral sentiment that shouldn't be surprising in a book first published 1894. Don't get me wrong; I don't mind moralistic writing in the least. What I mind is the ham-handed style.
Now, the good: my five-year-old liked this book a lot, and said he wanted he wanted to get all of Mary Burt's writings. On the other hand, when I asked him what he liked about the book, he said, "the font." Seriously, I think the style appealed to him--but then, considering that this is an old-fashioned (nineteenth century) style, that just shows you that he's a weird little kid. And, since this was not a "greatest hits of Greek & Roman myth" sort of book, we did get exposed to a greater variety of myth than we had had from our various other sources so far.
In short, this gets three stars from us (I might have given it two if not for my son's opinion) simply because it's a fairly mediocre book, both as philosophy and as myth. It's not surprising it was out of print until revived by "Yesterday's Classics."
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Tags : Stories from Plato and Other Classic Writers: Hesiod, Homer, Aristophanes, Ovid, Catullus, and Pliny [Mary E. Burt] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The interior of this book is a facsimile reproduction of a rare book published in Boston, by Ginn & Company,Mary E. Burt,Stories from Plato and Other Classic Writers: Hesiod, Homer, Aristophanes, Ovid, Catullus, and Pliny,CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform,1514639084,LITERARY COLLECTIONS General
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Stories from Plato and Other Classic Writers Hesiod Homer Aristophanes Ovid Catullus and Pliny Mary E Burt 9781514639085 Books Reviews
I got this thinking that, maybe, there were some child-accessible explanations of Plato's philosophy. Not really. There is a bit of philosophy--the actual philosophical content is about 10%--but mostly it's mythology. It's not particularly good storytelling, either, although I've seen worse. The language is a little antique, but not too challenging for 8-12 year olds or so. There are a few weird quirks which makes me think that it wasn't well edited the same stories are told first in one chapter and then retold a slightly different way in the next. This is done for three or more different stories. This isn't a damning problem, and one can imagine pedagogical reasons for doing this, but it was pretty jarring and in the end I didn't like it. As is to be expected, given the time this was published, the names of the gods are Roman, not Greek. There is also a moralistic tendency which is occasionally annoying, but again, not too bad. The only thing that I really liked about the book, its saving grace so to speak, is the fact that it helped fill in the gaps of our exposure to Greek & Roman mythology there are several here that are not found among any of the several mythology books we've read so far. In short, it's not surprising that this was allowed to go out of print for so long. It's not bad, it's just not very good.
This book was written in 1894, but for the most part is pretty fresh. There are 27 chapters and each story is based on an ancient text. It has been fun as an adult to puzzle out the origins of each tale. My six year old is enjoying listening to this book too.
My little boy has been exposed to a fair bit of philosophy, since my own training was in that subject. I was looking for another philosophy book after we read The Little Book of Big Questions. I got this book thinking it might have a significant amount of Plato's philosophy in it. It has only a tiny bit of recognizable moral philosophy. Most of the selections are myths, and indeed 90-95% of this book is myth. Of course, like all myth, the stories had plenty of moralistic elements, but that's different from moral philosophy.
Qua myth, this is a rather disappointing collection to me. My son has read a lot of myth, too, and he enjoyed this. First, I can't say that I like this writer much. She goes into great detail on relatively trivial points and leaves development of the main action/theme threadbare. On a couple of occasions Burt repeats the same myth, in a different way, from one chapter to the next, as if she had forgotten to take out one of the versions. Maybe there is a pedagogical reason for this, but I'm not so sure. As for those myths that I recognized (about half of them), quite a few seemed to have significant details changed.
Primitive explanations of phenomena are presented in the author's voice, or when it isn't clear whether she's speaking for herself or on behalf of the myth source. Of course, there's nothing wrong with giving primitive explanations of phenomena in a book of myth--that's what a lot of myth is about, after all--but there is something wrong, and annoying, in writing daft (Burt's introduction uses the word "poetic") stuff that isn't clearly presented as myth.
Similarly backwards is the gratuitous nineteenth-century moral sentiment that shouldn't be surprising in a book first published 1894. Don't get me wrong; I don't mind moralistic writing in the least. What I mind is the ham-handed style.
Now, the good my five-year-old liked this book a lot, and said he wanted he wanted to get all of Mary Burt's writings. On the other hand, when I asked him what he liked about the book, he said, "the font." Seriously, I think the style appealed to him--but then, considering that this is an old-fashioned (nineteenth century) style, that just shows you that he's a weird little kid. And, since this was not a "greatest hits of Greek & Roman myth" sort of book, we did get exposed to a greater variety of myth than we had had from our various other sources so far.
In short, this gets three stars from us (I might have given it two if not for my son's opinion) simply because it's a fairly mediocre book, both as philosophy and as myth. It's not surprising it was out of print until revived by "Yesterday's Classics."
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