Books like The Athenian Murders — picked by fans

An American scientist and her Greek-American professor husband relocate to Greece with their young children as the millennium approaches. Dr. Orme, now back in the USA and a Vice President for Boeing, writes eloquently about her family’s decision to establish their home in Greece, a country whose language and customs are new and often challenging for an American immigrant. Her journey into the arms of a warm Greek community is shared through a series of vignettes that give readers an honest glimpse into the life and culture of modern Greece, and its positive impact on her own life and her family’s future.

Katherine, a Greek immigrant to the US, took her American children to Greece in the late 1930s to live on her family’s farm and escape from the Great Depression. Unfortunately, the arrival of the Nazi invaders trapped the family in Greece during the Occupation and the end of World War II. Based on a true family story, American Kid movingly describes the experiences of the children in the remote mountain village of Katherine’s birth, and their efforts to survive the occupation of their home by Nazis. Would they ever see their beloved America again? An authentic glimpse of the devastating war’s impact on innocent youth and the value of hope.

Frederic Kakis, a brilliant scientist and moving writer, shares a personal story of survival and fortitude for a Jewish family in Northern Greece during the Nazi occupation. Close to 80,000 were relocated to Nazi concentration campus far from their homes in Thessaloniki and close to 60,000 did not survive the Holocaust. Dr. Kakis describes the terror experienced as well as the courage shown by Greek Jews and their local Christian neighbors during this tragic invasion, and how their efforts helped as many of the vulnerable as possible survive. 

In Book 11, Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis, fresh from Athens to the picturesque Greek island, must find the perpetrators of a gruesome murder of a young woman found dead in a rural church. Siger, via his blunt investigator Kaldis, is an expert in sprinkling the beautiful Greek landscape with notes of suspense and mystery, and, like the earlier entries in this attractive series, Murder in Mykonos does not disappoint.

I have collaborated with Bettany over many years—in her scholarly documentary filmmaking, including programmes on Socrates of Athens (469-399). Socrates never wrote or published in written form a word of his philosophy, yet through his immediate and succeeding disciples (above all Plato and Aristotle) has been hugely influential. But was he a democrat, as his fellow Athenians understood that term? In 399 a jury of 501 of his peers, chosen randomly by lot, delivered their resounding—negative—verdict, and condemned him to death by hemlock poison for being undemocratically irreligious and for teaching his pupils undemocratic values. Plato violently disagreed, and the debate over Socrates has continued ever since. Since it can be made to appear that he was convicted by an illiberal jury on grounds of his use of (democratic) freedom of speech, his condemnation has often been used as a stick to beat the ‘tyranny of… show more.

Athens is where I lived as a student in the 1970s, and I’ve loved the place ever since! People who visit Greece often miss out on the capital or find the modern city ugly and noisy. But this book explains the magic effect that Athens has exercised on natives and visitors for at least two thousand years – all the way from the legendary wisdom of Solon the lawgiver to the gritty problems of a decade of enforced austerity (only recently overcome), and of a new multi-culturalism that comes with mass migration across Europe’s front line into Greece.

In case it hasn’t yet become rather obvious, I love the history of ancient Greece and especially the city of democratic Athens during the 5th century BCE and the lifetime of Pericles (c. 495-429).

To help explain why, I could just reel off a list of famous names—famous not only in their own time but also still in our own day: playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, philosopher Socrates, historian Thucydides, architects Callicrates and Ictinus, and, not least, master sculptor Pheidias, Athenians all.

The last three were united together with Pericles by their involvement in, indeed, the creation of, one of the greatest buildings of the entire Western tradition: the Parthenon, a temple of Athena the Virgin unique in its aesthetic adornment and refinement.

History, however, should not only celebrate but also educate and even warn, as does independent scholar David Stuttard in his totally gripping cultural history. Hubris has become… show more.

Strap on your toga, Watsonus, the game is afoot…or something like that.

Who needs Consulting Detective when you’ve got the literal inventor of logic on the case? The ancient Greek philosopher gets drawn into a messy case of murder defending the family of a former student.

I read this just after coming back from Athens—I wish I had it while I was there to compare the mentions in the text to real-life sites! 

All through my school years, I heard that democracy began in Athens, in ancient Greece. But I never understood how that could have happened. To me, constitutions and democracy began with the American and French Revolutions. It turns out that Athenian democracy too began with a revolution! And it was a situation very similar to our own origins: A democratic revolution in a slave-owning society! And at a time when a “national” identity was just being formed out of local and regional ones. This is a book of essays, and you don’t have to read them all. But Josiah Ober is the foremost modern expert on Athenian society and the origins of its democracy, and his essays on that topic in this book are the best accounts we have.

He clearly presents a world that is thousands of years away from us and very strange, but shows how they confronted… show more.

I loved this book, by a brilliant younger French scholar, because it’s simply one of the best books around on the life and times of the Athenian democratic leader and, no less, his fluctuating reputation in and after antiquity right up to the early 21st century.

Being a prominent politician in a direct democracy that lacked political parties and any means of mass communication except face-to-face interaction meant a precarious, topsy-turvy life for would-be ‘demagogues’, leaders of the people, like the great Pericles.

I loved how Dr. Azoulay explored all the facets of Pericles’ multiple interactions during his generally brilliant career, including the more scandalous ones such as his eccentric love life. I loved, too, how he traced all the ups and downs of Pericles’ reputation over 24 centuries, showing expertly just how foreign a country the past can be—our past no less than that of the ancient Greeks.