The Road to Delphi: Scenes from the History of Oracles

Rating:
Summary: Do not waste your time or money reading this book.
Review: The book lacks any sort of cohesiveness. The author rambles on about superfluous facts, which makes for a very dull story. Do not waste your time reading the book. The poor showing also indicates that books reviewed by the Washington Post (as this one was )can be duds.

Rating:
Summary: Do not waste your time or money reading this book.
Review: The book lacks any sort of cohesiveness. The author rambles on about superfluous facts, which makes for a very dull story. Do not waste your time reading the book. The poor showing also indicates that books reviewed by the Washington Post (as this one was )can be duds.

Rating:
Summary: Very very good
Review: This is an enjoyable book, one which can be read straight through or left at one end of the sofa and picked up and continued when the mood strikes one. Or when the omens are promising. The author is learned and writes gracefully, evoking an earlier age -- or many earlier ages -- when literary critics and scholars wrote lucid, elegant, and insightful prose for their peers as well as for the educated -- or simply the interested -- general reader.

I won't say much about the topic, oracles, except to say that we homo sapiens seem to have a rather persistent propensity to be afflicted by oracle-ism: a kind of prophetic wisdom, at odds with commonsensical or empirical knowledge, and therefore acquired on the cheap. And convincing because it implies a flattering interest in us by significant powers.