Renowned French otolaryngologist Jean Abitbol, a lifetime student of the human voice, takes readers on an unforgettable odyssey spanning man's first use of voice through the acquisition of language to the use of voice as an expression of self. With great wit and charm, Dr. Abitbol's narrative encompasses everything from the psychological to the physiological, from explaining the workings of the voice to celebrating the human voice's highest achievements. He describes a fascinating history of the voice, its origins, its course since the Homo Sapiens' first sentences, its episodes of hoarseness, and its achievements, from the newborn cry to the coloratura soprano, from the impersonator to the ventriloquist. After exploring what is known about the voice, Dr. Abitbol tells us what our voices are capable of. He examines what he describes as "the magic of the voice": the voice as a fingerprint, a reflection of our personality in expressing our sex and sexuality. A great portion of this odyssey is devoted to singing and singers, both to the complexity of singing in general and to lyrical singing, the intricacies of which requires participation of the mechanical, emotional, and cerebral systems. The mysteries of the voice unfold as Dr. Abitbol guides readers through the latest physiological and pathological research using examples of historical figures', patients', and celebrities' voices to explain how the ways in which the body moves affect the way the voice sounds and how vocal quality is unique to each human being. A unique tour de force of the human vocal instrument, Odyssey of the Voice changes the way we think about our voices.

In The Odyssey of an Apple Thief, Moishe Rozenbaumas (1922–2016) recounts his fascinating life, from his Lithuanian boyhood, to the fraught experiences that take him across Europe and Central Asia and back again, to his daring escape from Soviet Russia to build a new life in Paris. Along the way, we get a rarely seen portrait of the lives of working-class Jewish youth in Telz/Telsiai, a religious town renowned for its yeshiva. We hear of the games children played, the theft of apples from a Catholic orchard, and Rozenbaumas’s early apprenticeship as a tailor once his father leaves the country. The war breaks out and the teenaged Rozenbaumas flees Lithuania alone, unable to convince his mother and sibling to go with him. We learn of his life as a starved refugee in an Uzbek kolkhoz, his escape into the Red Army, and his unlikely work in the reconnaissance unit of the Soviet Army. After the war, Rozenbaumas is drafted into the Marxist-Leninist university and as a cadre of the Communist Party, ultimately escaping in 1956 with his family to Paris, where he and his wife give an openly Jewish education to their children. In the vast literature of memory written by Jewish witnesses before, during, and after WWII, Rozenbaumas’s account stands out for the singularity of his experience and for his deft narration of events of mythological dimension from a personal perspective. The Odyssey of an Apple Thief offers not only invaluable testimony of this historical moment but also an illuminating and original portrait of Lithuanian Jews in the twentieth century.

This book focuses on mythos and voice in the Odyssey, to illuminate its characters’ journeys from social displacement through discovery and recovery. Mythos and Voice approaches the Odyssey as a narrative of displacement – a narrative that maps the social displacement of its characters, explores the cognitive consequences of that displacement, and embodies the variable strategies by which those characters learn to resolve their displacement. It is a narrative that also employs and elaborates the characters’ own narratives of displacement as genres enabling them to resist externally imposed definitions of their situations and to redefine and ultimately reclaim their own place in the world, not as it was before their displacement, but as it must be, given the new post-heroic world in which they now live. The focus on mythos and voice enables readers to approach the study of learning and the acquisition of personal agency in the context of a hazardous world – the cultural world that Odysseus navigates in Homer’s epic poem. With this focus, the author examines interactive processes of human learning in a specific cultural context – the epic universe of Homeric narrative. By ethnographically examining the learning contexts portrayed inHomer’s epic, Mythos and Voice elucidates an Archaic Greek view of human learning through examples that show how the author(s) of the Odyssey envisioned and dramatized displacement, learning and agency in the epic work. The book focuses on aspects of Homeric cognition as they cumulatively develop among key characters within the Odyssey’s inventive narrative structure. In this way, Mythos and Voice describes a culturally specific “theory” of learning and development – a perspective that proved compelling in the pre-classical and classical Greek world, even as it does to readers now.

Since their composition almost 3,000 years ago the Homeric epics have lost none of their power to grip audiences and fire the imagination: with their stories of life and death, love and loss, war and peace they continue to speak to us at the deepest level about who we are across the span of generations. That being said, the world of Homer is in many ways distant from that in which we live today, with fundamental differences not only in language, social order, and religion, but in basic assumptions about the world and human nature. This volume offers a detailed yet accessible introduction to ancient Greek culture through the lens of Book One of the Odyssey, covering all of these aspects and more in a comprehensive Introduction designed to orient students in their studies of Greek literature and history. The full Greek text is included alongside a facing English translation which aims to reproduce as far as feasible the word order and sound play of the Greek original and is supplemented by a Glossary of Technical Terms and a full vocabulary keyed to the specific ways that words are used in Odyssey I. At the heart of the volume is a full-length line-by-line commentary, the first in English since the 1980s and updated to bring the latest scholarship to bear on the text: focusing on philological and linguistic issues, its close engagement with the original Greek yields insights that will be of use to scholars and advanced students as well as to those coming to the text for the first time.

A BRILLIANT AND BEGUILING REIMAGINING OF ONE OF OUR GREATEST MYTHS BY A GIFTED YOUNG WRITER Zachary Mason's brilliant and beguiling debut novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, reimagines Homer's classic story of the hero Odysseus and his long journey home after the fall of Troy. With brilliant prose, terrific imagination, and dazzling literary skill, Mason creates alternative episodes, fragments, and revisions of Homer's original that taken together open up this classic Greek myth to endless reverberating interpretations. The Lost Books of the Odyssey is punctuated with great wit, beauty, and playfulness; it is a daring literary page-turner that marks the emergence of an extraordinary new talent.

Frederick Ahl and Hanna M. Roisman believe that contemporary readers who do not know ancient Greek can gain a sophisticated grasp of the Odyssey if they are aware of some of the issues that intrigue and puzzle the experts. They offer a challenging new reading of the epic that is directed to the general student of literature as well as to the classicist.Ahl and Roisman suggest that, while translators have served the Odyssey and its English-speaking readers remarkably well, the nonspecialist wishing to do a more detailed, critical reading of the epic faces a dilemma. The enormous scholarly literature makes few concessions to the nonspecialist, and those studies designed for general readers tend to offer variations on the overly simple, idealized readings of the epic common in high school and college survey courses.The Odyssey Re-Formed offers a lively and detailed reading of the Odyssey, episode by episode, with particular attention paid to the manipulative power of its language and Homer's skill in using that power. The authors explore how myth is shaped for specific, rhetorical reasons and suggest ways in which the epic uses its audience's awareness of the varied pool of mythic traditions to give the Odyssey remarkable and subtle resonances that have profound poetic power.

Invaluable guide to ancient Greek literature and literary theory through the representation of poetry and the figure of the poet.