Knidos was renowned for its nude statue of the goddess Aphrodite. This book is about searching for Aphrodite, a memoire exploring the author's involvement with the excavation of the huge city, while his own life was transformed from adolescent gaucheness into the beginnings of maturity. Laced with poetic evocations of the ancient and modern world, it contains hilarious stories of the people he met along the way.

Knidos was renowned for its nude statue of the goddess Aphrodite. This book is about searching for Aphrodite, a memoire exploring the authores involvement with the excavation of the huge city, while his own life was transformed from adolescent gaucheness into the beginnings of maturity. Laced with poetic evocations of the ancient and modern world, it contains hilarious stories of the people he met along the way."

A cultural history of the goddess of love, from a New York Times bestselling and award-winning historian. Aphrodite was said to have been born from the sea, rising out of a froth of white foam. But long before the Ancient Greeks conceived of this voluptuous blonde, she existed as an early spirit of fertility on the shores of Cyprus -- and thousands of years before that, as a ferocious warrior-goddess in the Middle East. Proving that this fabled figure is so much more than an avatar of commercialized romance, historian Bettany Hughes reveals the remarkable lifestory of one of antiquity's most potent myths. Venus and Aphrodite brings together ancient art, mythology, and archaeological revelations to tell the story of human desire. From Mesopotamia to modern-day London, from Botticelli to Beyoncé, Hughes explains why this immortal goddess continues to entrance us today -- and how we trivialize her power at our peril.

Knidos was renowned for its nude statue of the goddess Aphrodite. Laced with poetic evocations of the ancient and modern world, it contains hilarious stories of the people the author, a renowned archaeologist, met along the way.

Well-researched and true to the original myths, each volume in the Goddess Girls series addresses contemporary issues like friendships and relationships from a classically accurate—and entertaining—persepective. In Aphrodite the Beauty, Aphrodite, goddessgirl of love, must deal with jealousy after giving Athena a makeover. It doesn’t seem fair that the godboys pay more attention to her friend when Aphrodite is supposed to be destined for love! She also copes with a crush from an unlikely source—the nerdy Hephaestus (god of the smith)—and learns that love comes in many forms.

A “thrilling, well-researched” account of years of scandal at the prestigious Getty Museum (Ulrich Boser, author of The Gardner Heist). In recent years, several of America’s leading art museums have voluntarily given up their finest pieces of classical art to the governments of Italy and Greece. Why would they be moved to such unheard-of generosity? The answer lies at the Getty, one of the world’s richest and most troubled museums, and scandalous revelations that it had been buying looted antiquities for decades. Drawing on a trove of confidential museum records and candid interviews, these two journalists give us a fly-on-the-wall account of the inner workings of a world-class museum, and tell a story of outlandish characters and bad behavior that could come straight from the pages of a thriller. “In an authoritative account, two reporters who led a Los Angeles Times investigation reveal the details of the Getty Museum’s illicit purchases, from smugglers and fences, of looted Greek and Roman antiquities. . . . The authors offer an excellent recap of the museum’s misdeeds, brimming with tasty details of the scandal that motivated several of America’s leading art museums to voluntarily return to Italy and Greece some 100 classical antiquities worth more than half a billion dollars.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review “An astonishing and penetrating look into a veiled world where beauty and art are in constant competition with greed and hypocrisy. This engaging book will cast a fresh light on many of those gleaming objects you see in art museums.” —Jonathan Harr, author of The Lost Painting

Original publication and copyright date: 2011.