THE LEGEND OF ODYSSEUS

Odysseus' story retold in five segments interspersed with photos and drawings of maps, weaponry, artifacts, and architectural reconstructions of ancient Greece, in an attempt to link the legends with recent archeological discoveries indicating the existence of a historical Troy. Unfortunately, the alternation between episodes of the legend and pages on archeology and history interrupts the narrative and detracts from the impact of both. The forgettable text is not much helped by the lurid, sensational illustrations for the ""story."" Connolly's weaponry is meticulously detailed; he says that ""mortals are shown with covered breasts and goddesses with uncovered breasts, [in Mycenean fashion] for convenience,"" but he has not always followed his own dictum, and his goddesses look more like Vargas girls than members of the Greek Pantheon. The profusely illustrated informational pages are somewhat more successful, although there is at least one captioning error. Poorly bound and designed and generally of uneven quality. Index.