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Join Andrea Marcolongo, renowned classicist and one of today's most original thinkers on antiquity, for an inspiring journey as she learns to run--and to live--like a Greek.
Why do we run? To what end, all the effort and pain? Wherefore this love of muscle, speed, and sweat? The Greeks were the first to ask these questions, the first to suspend war, work, politics, to enjoy public celebrations of athletic prowess. They invented sport and they were also the first to understand how physical activity connected to our mental well-being.
After a lifetime spent with her head and heart in the books trying to think like a Greek, at a professional and personal crossroads, Andrea Marcolongo set out to learn how to run like a Greek. In doing so, she deepened her understanding of the ancient civilization she has spent decades studying and discovered more about herself than she could ever have dreamed.
In this spirited, generous, and engaging book, Marcolongo shares her erudition and her own journey to understanding that a healthy body is, in more ways than one might guess, a healthy mind.
From one of Europe's most original and brilliant classicists, an inspiring and deeply personal reflection on loss, memory, and what we owe the past and others, inspired by a night spent in Athens' Acropolis Museum
One day in late spring, Andrea Marcolongo walks into an outdoor store in Paris to buy a camp bed, a sleeping bag, and a flashlight. Her destination: not a remote forest or mountain peak, but the deserted halls of one of the most famous museums in the world, the Acropolis Museum in Athens, Greece, where she has been invited to spend a night completely alone.
But it's hard to be truly alone when you're surrounded by the scarred beauty of the Parthenon, lit only by the moon and summoning echoes and ghosts from the past. One of the shadows visiting Marcolongo is that of Lord Elgin, the English diplomat who in the early 19th century orchestrated the controversial removal of the Parthenon marbles from Ottoman Greece to London, where they remain today. The other is the memory of Andrea's father, whose recent death she is still mourning.
Drawing on a lifetime of engagement with classical culture and its legacy, Marcolongo examines the burning question of the restitution of works of art removed during the age of imperialism, and the broader issue of the role of power and inequality in the history of art. As the night goes by, however, the empty space left by the missing statues--a wound filled with white plaster--starts evoking other, more personal absences. Surrounded and inspired by the ruins and splendor of the classical world, Marcolongo reflects on the ever-changing relationship between present and past, and on the choices and people that make us who we are, even--or perhaps especially--when we have to leave them behind. The result is a powerful and courageous book, one that crosses time and space to remind us that we cannot live in isolation but are continuously connected and indebted to others.
Marcolongo is today's Montaigne...There is wisdom and grace here to last the ages.--André Aciman, author of Call Me by Your Name
A brilliant meditation on language and life.--Bookriot
For word nerds, language loons, and grammar geeks, an impassioned and informative literary leap into the wonders of the Greek language. Here are nine ways Greek can transform your relationship to time and to those around you, nine reflections on the language of Sappho, Plato, and Thucydides, and its relevance to our lives today, nine chapters that will leave readers with a new passion for a very old language, nine epic reasons to love Greek.
The Ingenious Language is a love song dedicated to the language of history's greatest poets, philosophers, adventurers, lovers, adulterers, and generals. Greek, as Marcolongo explains in her buoyant and entertaining prose, is unsurpassed in its beauty and expressivity, but it can also offer us new ways of seeing the world and our place in it. She takes readers on an astonishing journey, at the end of which, while it may still be Greek to you, you'll have nine reasons to be glad it is.
No batteries or prior knowledge of Greek required
From the best-selling author of The Ingenious Language comes a meditation on rebuilding, recovery, and renewal that is also a fascinating portrait of antiquity's most complex and surprisingly modern hero.
In times of peace and prosperity, one can turn to Homer to learn valuable life lessons, to experience the thrills and terrors of war, and to read about hair-raising adventures in distant lands. But when things do not go as planned, when we unexpectedly find ourselves at the center of an epoch-defining upheaval, then, writes Andrea Marcolongo, we must look to Virgil's Aeneas for an example of adaptability and resilience.
In Marcolongo's fresh, nuanced portrayal, Virgil's Aeneas emerges as a multiform, deeply human hero, striking in his vulnerability and capacity for empathy. His journey of rebirth and rebuilding, from the ruins of Troy to the shores of Italy, teaches us that when all seems lost, with hope, perseverance, and a little bit of luck, we can seek and find new beginnings.
Marcolongo is today's Montaigne...There is wisdom and grace here to last the ages.--André Aciman, author of Call Me by Your Name
