Reviews for Belief and Unbelief in Hispanic Literature: Papers from a Conference at the University of Hall, 12 and 13 December 1994

The average rating for Belief and Unbelief in Hispanic Literature: Papers from a Conference at the University of Hall, 12 and 13 December 1994 based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-03-28 00:00:00 Judson Spangler In what is basically a faux-biography of the Homeric hero Odysseus, this book is a fun, clever little exercise, but severely lacking in multiple ways. For starters, Beye does a really shabby job of integrating The Iliad and The Odyssey, choosing to portray the latter as essentially the figment of fevered minds or some such. In fact, all of Beye's "explanations" for the fantastic events of these stories are really flimsy, and miss the most credible means of explanation. Also, when faced with actions that are "out of character", Beye contrives to sweep them under the rug, as being something that befuddles historians, rather than the behavior of full and well-developed human beings. A great way to piss away a few days, and get some interesting second-hand narrative out of the deal, but pretty much lame beyond that. Plus, it has more typos and unclear sentences than any book I've ever read.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-08-18 00:00:00 Joan N. Boothe It feels somewhat wrong to give the same number of stars to this book as The Iliad and The Odyssey; however, I've done just that because Beye has made Odysseus extremely accessible without this book being overly scholarly, and thus, overly dry. The style of the work is good and reconstructs Odysseus' life and times that a neophyte Greek historian like myself can digest. I highly recommend this book to anyone looking to understand either of Homer's works a little more clearly. I had just finished up the aforementioned books before getting into this one and it was very good to get a recap at the end. I only wish I had read The Aeneid prior, but c'est la vie? Now it's on to Ulysses (and if my previous encounter with Joyce is a harbinger of things to come, a commentary on that as well).