text: I thoroughly enjoyed the author's earlier work on how the Irish saved civilization.  But this book was a disappointing compendium of Greek myths, legends and history that never reveals a plan behind the book.  Taken in its subparts, many sections are engagingly informative in an elegant if sometimes pretentious prose.  Yet the author ambles from here to there in a disjointed narrative with interesting nuggets but little insight.  Where's the big picture?  The author attempts to wrap it up at the end with a sentence about the Greeks' "variety of human response, lightening quick transmutations, resourcefulness, and inexhaustible creativity."  
  
  A subtitle like "A Greek Treasury of Personal Vignettes" might have been more descriptive and merited another star. But it falls short as a "hinge of history" with impoverished and even maladaptive connections (FDR as Solon - really?) to the modern world. I am sorry to not recommend it.
  