D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths

Product Information

This newly updated edition includes a new cover and an afterword featuring never-before-published drawings from the sketchbook of Ingri and Edgar D’Aulaire - plus an essay about their life and work and photos from the family archive.

When she was 15, the Norwegian painter Harriet Backer encouraged her to pursue art as a career, and Ingri later studied at art schools in Norway, Germany and France. These are stories full of all the things we love in tales---action, adventure, love, cruelty, war, friendship, fighting---all the things that make us human. But leaving that omission aside, this anthology is fairly comprehensive, and will provide the young enthusiast with almost all the major mythological stories of the ancient Greek tradition.Still, they love this book, and I hope they share it with their kids (if they choose to have kids) in turn. The artwork is incredibly detailed and beautiful, and the written portrayal of the various gods and goddesses, heroes and monsters is highly sympathetic toward and attentive to the strengths and failings of human beings, of both virtue and weakness (strengths and failings which the Greek deities were believed to share themselves, in no small measure). One can see how a child would want to read this over and over, but it's a great read for adults, too. We encourage them to think for themselves, to question, to seek, to demand that authority earns respect, so their experience with the book isn't as revelatory as mine.

I am an absolute fan of Greek myths for I read this book ten years ago in paperback format and it has stuck with me ever since. I -- Io: I liked her punishment from Hera, being turned into a cow, but I don't think it is fair for just having been with Zeus. All the stuff she did was pretty cool, and really smart to make the daughters of that King cook him alive.In 2005, New York Review Books reissued Norse Gods and Giants under the name d'Aulaires' Book of Norse Myths. The stories have been dialed back a bit for bitlets, but the stories still hold true to the original intentions, in my opinion. Everyone, no matter what his or her age, should read this indispensable retelling of the Greek Myths, a foundation stone of the Western tradition.