"The War That Killed Achilles"

New History Books of Note

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(5 customer reviews)

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The One-Star review says: "I would give it 5 stars for regurgitating trivial knowledge, 3 stars for being a competent plot summary with about a dozen sentences with interesting insights, and a zero for actually coming to terms with the subjects that the book is supposedly addressing."

The other reviewers are more credible. They were all written by fairly highly ranked reviewers with some obvious interest in the topic, and with no need for snide remarks.

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You may find the NewYorkTimes review here. Steve Coates, an editor at the Book Review, writes:

Alexander’s own interpretations aren’t always persuasive. Achilles is at once a starlike demigod and a raging monster. In order to present him as an ideal commander, a serious theoretical critic of the social order and, most dubiously, a peacemaker, Alexander has to play down both his human flaws and his deeply disturbing Dark Angel aspects. Distracting, too, are the modern war parallels she draws — from World War I, Vietnam, Somalia, Iraq; fleeting and uninspired, they are, one suspects, an unnecessary effort to suggest contemporary “relevance.”

Yet, “the Trojan War represents Total War,” Alexander insightfully maintains: by the end of the “Iliad,” the cumulated grief of doomed Trojans, ordinary men, women and children, “is a match for the heroic and outsize grief” of godlike Achilles. This, after all, is the import of the epic’s title, she writes: “The ‘Iliad’ relates the fate of the soon-to-be-extinct city of ­Ilion” — and, by extension, the fate of the Mycenaean cities from which the distant ancestors of Homer’s audience fled; the fate of Carthage and then of Rome, in the imagination of cultured Romans; and ultimately, the fate of any human society subject to the sword.

The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War

• Author: Caroline Alexander
  
• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult (October 15, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670021121