Books 2010: landscapes and histories
Jun. 23rd, 2010 08:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hawkwing_lbBooks 2010: 49-50
49. Anthony Price, The '44 Vintage.
Second Lieutenant David Audley and Corporal Butler ride through 1944 France in the company of corrupted British officers, honourable Germans, competent Americans, and French communists. There's something hidden in a chateau - something valuable - and it's all down to who can get to it first.
I didn't enjoy this book half as much as I enjoy the 1970s ones. But it's not half bad.
non-fiction
50. Susan Guettel Cole, Landscapes, Gender, and Ritual Space: the Ancient Greek Experience, California, 2004.
I found this piece from the Bryn Mawr Classical Review that's already done the hard slog of breaking down what this book is about. I'm not as convinced as the reviewer of the essential coherence of Cole's work, but it is certainly a detailed and well-thought-out book, with a focused and scholarly command of the evidence.
Cole here has set out to chart the liminal spaces of ritual practice and ritual context, relating both of these to the organisation of the polis, the construction of gender and gendered bodies, and the role of landscape. I was particularly impressed - and intrigued - by her chapter on pollution and purity, which laid out in a more clear fashion than I had heretofore encountered precisely why questions of purity and pollution were important in ancient Greek ritual contexts. Her discussion of reproductive anxieties and their relation to cult and ritual is also illuminating.
It gave me some things to think about, which is useful.
Today, I ran a mile in under ten minutes, and two miles in twenty-two. Not exactly brilliant, and I'm going to have to do better than this if I want to start running 10Ks, but it's better than last week.
I may have overdone it with the twenty minutes' rowing, though, after climbing and karate yesterday. The band of muscle across my shoulderblades is freaking painful.
49. Anthony Price, The '44 Vintage.
Second Lieutenant David Audley and Corporal Butler ride through 1944 France in the company of corrupted British officers, honourable Germans, competent Americans, and French communists. There's something hidden in a chateau - something valuable - and it's all down to who can get to it first.
I didn't enjoy this book half as much as I enjoy the 1970s ones. But it's not half bad.
non-fiction
50. Susan Guettel Cole, Landscapes, Gender, and Ritual Space: the Ancient Greek Experience, California, 2004.
I found this piece from the Bryn Mawr Classical Review that's already done the hard slog of breaking down what this book is about. I'm not as convinced as the reviewer of the essential coherence of Cole's work, but it is certainly a detailed and well-thought-out book, with a focused and scholarly command of the evidence.
Cole here has set out to chart the liminal spaces of ritual practice and ritual context, relating both of these to the organisation of the polis, the construction of gender and gendered bodies, and the role of landscape. I was particularly impressed - and intrigued - by her chapter on pollution and purity, which laid out in a more clear fashion than I had heretofore encountered precisely why questions of purity and pollution were important in ancient Greek ritual contexts. Her discussion of reproductive anxieties and their relation to cult and ritual is also illuminating.
It gave me some things to think about, which is useful.
Today, I ran a mile in under ten minutes, and two miles in twenty-two. Not exactly brilliant, and I'm going to have to do better than this if I want to start running 10Ks, but it's better than last week.
I may have overdone it with the twenty minutes' rowing, though, after climbing and karate yesterday. The band of muscle across my shoulderblades is freaking painful.
