By Jove

I bought this book about 26 or so years ago and have kept it to use as a quick reference. It’s easy for the average person to comprehend and the author’s humorous, succinct style makes the book enjoyable to read. I wonder how many people have become interested in a more in-depth study of Greek and Roman mythology as a result of reading this book.

I liked the book because it quickly covered a lot of material that I had forgotten, and it shows how many words and terms in the English language came from the Greeks.

This is one of the best casual-reading mythology books I've picked up. You can open to any page and find something of interest, explained in Macrone's fresh and funny style. This simple, accessible book makes clear how ancient mythology has survived in words, customs, naming systems, and such, and outlines the most famous stories in world mythology. (Ours being a Western culture, Macrone focuses on Greco-Roman mythology, but makes connections to several ancient cultures.) The book's only drawback is its potentially addictive quality: mythology is so interwoven that this book must be also. Expect lots of cross-references, and thus lots of pageturning. Each page will open a new topic to you. Beware an addiction to this wealth of knowledge!

Not being familiar with Michael MacRone's(the author) work, I thought that this book would be your basic book of the ancient tales that the Romans would have spun. However, when I flipped through the pages of this book upon its arrival, I was sorely mistaken. This book does not have to do so much with the stories surrounding Zeus and the other Roman deities, but how ther culture has influence ours and the sayings and words derived from their language. If you look from it as a purely fun read though, it is filled with interesting facts but often it leaves you with more questions; Michael MacRone spends too much time trying to explain the myths in a logical way when it is quite obvious that with such a 'titanic'(thanks to MacRone) body of information and the different way that Romans looked upon life just cannot be explained fully and should just be cherished as they are.His 'witty' add-ins are quite off-putting to me, but you might enjoy them, his remarks are more like the ones of an extremely world-tired, snide, snickering person. All in all, it did not seem like he had much respect for what he was writing about, that is not a good launching off point to get others interested, sadly for MacRone.I would have given this 2 stars because of his inept way of trying to make a mountain into a molehole(I know it sounds strange), but between the snide comments and fallible explanations, there were some glimmers of the fabulous work from countless of Romans before our time.

This book is not only a great recreational resource, but an invaluable educational composition as well. I am in 8th grade, and when the mythology unit was started as part of the latin class, I brought this book to the teacher, really just so she could see where I was getting my information. She hasn't used another book since. I highly recommend it for all occasions; it gets my five stars and two thumbs up!

I picked up the book at the Getty Museum as I wandered through the sundry sculptures and paintings drawing blanks at times at the curator's notes. My remedy was this book. While I cannotverify accuracy of dates and sources of the mythological storiesdue to the myriad of versions, I found my interest quickly perked up traveling through the museum. It really helped me familiarize with not only mythology but also etymology.