Zeus greek god biography book

Among the usual gods and goddesses, readers will learn about centaurs, Pegasus, and Medusa in this fascinating series. It is hard to make a series about Greek mythology feel fresh, but the authors manage to do just that. With easy-to-read yet richly detailed text, young readers will encounter stories about their favorite deities that are not often recounted in other series. Classical illustrations and photos of statues and antiquities accompany the text. Topics cover the deities in art, how they were worshipped, and how views of them may have evolved over time. Online content and primary sources are available for close reading exercises and text-to-text questions. Each title wraps up with legendary facts, a glossary, further reading, an index, and online resources from the publisher. VERDICT Greek mythology is perpetually popular among children. This series builds on that interest with exciting stories and interesting new details. An excellent addition to libraries.

A major deity in decline dictates his epic and sensational life to a modern-day ghost writer. That’s the premise of my completed novel, Zeus: The Autobiography, a satire with heart about family, gender, sexual politics, romance, loss, and middle age.

What prompted this?

Memoirs from artists, celebrities, political figures, and any human being are always flawed even when interesting. Our human memories are imperfect and our intentions often unclear, even to ourselves. When the memoir’s author is someone contemporary with us, or a person we have studied, as a reader we often identify what is not said among the details the writer has decided to share. Reading the memoir becomes an ongoing exercise to compare established facts we know to speculate why the writer has either forgotten, politely set aside, or strains to swerve around these facts.

Gee, why does Julius Caesar write so much about bridges he made than how he established the Roman Empire?

Why does [celebrity name] glide past why [insert scandalous incident] which utterly ruined [insert names of psycho-emotional or physical human wreckage] when that’s why I largely got this book in the first place?

This gets amplified when books written by very flawed humans claim to have been divinely inspired, or even written by a divine hand itself. Inspired? When a Muse or a sky god or ancestral ghost or of the spirit of a beloved artist figuratively sets a hand on the author’s shoulder, whispering guidancer? Relatable and not too sketchy.

But when it becomes “I was magically directed to write this book in this way and you must believe it because I am right and otherwise you will be eternally damned in the afterlife and our enemy in this life” then “inspired” becomes ridiculous. Primates write these books, primates read them. If done in the present, we tend to dismiss such claims. If done in the past and previous generations fell for it? We lend it more credence as a tradition and a likely path to tr