Just the thing to slip into your carry-on.
In which the ancients tell us to pack our bags and see the world.
Travel can cure prejudice and xenophobia, expand horizons, and teach us that the rest of the world doesn’t always see things as we do. In the case of Herodotus, the lead author of this lively anthology, a few local unpleasantries teach us that “custom is king.” The Persian shah Darius, Herodotus writes in his Histories, asked a group of Greeks how much money it would take for them to eat their dead parents, “and they replied that they wouldn’t do it at any price,” while a group of Indians, asked how much it would cost for them to refrain from doing so, “begged Darius not to blaspheme.” Today, presumably, feasting on one’s kinfolks is too rare to make the guidebooks, but some of the verities assembled here are truly eternal. Writes the Roman philosopher Seneca, in a passage that classicist Usher gamely titles “Wherever You Go, There You Are,” the heaviest baggage a traveler carries is mental. “You must lay down the mind’s burden,” Seneca counsels. “Until you do, nowhere will satisfy you.” Usher’s authors travel the known world over, and farther still. One, Hanno, sails beyond the Pillars of Hercules and heads down the west coast of Africa, while another, the Syrian Greek novelist Lucian, heads to the Moon, discovering there “men who ride on huge vultures, making use of the birds as horses.” Closer to home, Pausanias, a traveler who wandered around Greece on the back of a donkey, visits the sacred shrine of Delphi, which “marks the center of the whole earth” and thus obviously warrants a visit. One of numerous Princeton University Press titles in which ancient writers and thinkers offer advice to moderns, this volume celebrates curiosity—and, on that note, even has a few words about dead cats.
Just the thing to slip into your carry-on.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9780691259062
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
