Word: odysseus
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Storytellers, like journalists, have never been much for emphasizing the sweet, the decent, the well behaved. Odysseus, to pluck an early example from Homer, was a wife-neglecting troublemaker if there ever was one. Even in the inspired stories of the Bible, people seldom behave very well, beginning with Adam and Eve and proceeding to Cain and Abel and the folk in Sodom and Gomorrah. Contemporary fictions create their own mischief: Portnoy, for example, spends precious little time collecting for the United Fund...
Still, Viet Nam was not unique in its effects upon the men who fought there. From Odysseus onward, almost all soldiers have come back angry from war. And they have had problems. In Elizabethan England, a disbandment of armies automatically meant a major increase in the number of thieves and highwaymen preying on civilians. In fact, veterans are almost always treated badly after a war, even if the brass bands do turn out for a ceremonial welcome home. During the '20s, the windows of the nation's pawnshops were filled with soldiers' medals for heroism from...
...involved and resonant adventure saga of how human civilization was reborn in a desert. Set on the waterless planet of Arrakis, or Dune, the book introduced a hero whose ancestry went back to the legendary Greek House of Atreus. Paul Atreides had something for everyone. He was part Odysseus, part Jesus and part Muhammad. His followers were a desert people forced by circumstances into a mystical and practical awareness of their ecosystem...
...never didactic, explanations. In fact, Gould is so careful to avoid sounding technical that he seems more a well-read humanist with a strong interest in evolutionary theory than a scientist who is well-educated in other fields. He refers in almost every essay to such non-scientists as Odysseus, Rabelais, Shakespeare, George Eliot, Alexander Pope, and even Muhammad Ali as bridges to lesser-known scientists like Richard Goldschmidt, Baron Georges Cuvier, Paul Broca, Randolph Kirkpatrick, and Thomas Henry Huxley...
...true pitch point of Trojan Women involves Hector's widow, Andromache (Billie Whitelaw) and her toddler son. Odysseus has convinced the Greeks that if the child grows to manhood, he may lead Troy in another war against the Greeks. He must be torn from his mother's skirts and dashed to death from the city's topless towers. One of the most wrenching scenes in all of Greek tragedy is shatteringly performed by Whitelaw when her little boy is taken and returned as a tiny corpse in the shell of Hector's shield...