For your heroine Recently, much attention has been paid to the mythical heroes of the ancient world. Their representations have been primarily masculine, and if you read the ancient literature, it’s easy to see why. The timeless tales of heroes were created by men for the enjoyment of men. Women, for the most part, played minor roles.

With Women of Mythology by Kay Retzlaff, we see, at last, ancient myth from a feminine perspective women as doers. From the no-nonsense ferocity of the Amazon queen, Myrine, who captured Atlantis, to the exploits of Chinese General Mulan, women arise from myth in much the same way as their male counterparts.

Illustrated with exquisite full-color reproductions of famous depictions of art, Women of Mythology takes readers, young and old alike, on an inspiring journey of women as seen through the eye of the ages.

Stephen Ambrose: a guide for appreciating our history Stephen E. Ambrose’s histories are as vivid as screenplays. One moment you’re overlooking the distant battlefield, the next you’re huddled head-to-head with the generals in the command tent. That’s how it is with Ambrose’s latest DeMillean epic, Nothing Like It In The World: The Men Who Built The Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869. By every measure from the speed at which it was done to the exquisite coordination of effort it required the railroad was a stunning achievement.

First came the dreamers and surveyors, as Ambrose recounts, then the capitalists and their political allies, and finally the hordes of laborers essential to giving substance to the dream.

Even as the Confederate army strove to split the nation apart, south from north, equally determined forces converged to bind it together, east to west by the railroad. The Central Pacific inched eastward over the mountains from Sacramento, California, while the Union Pacific crawled west across the plains and deserts from Omaha, Nebraska. Along the way, the builders had to contend with gargantuan costs and shaky financing, impassible mountains, worker shortages, devastating weather, fragile supply lines, hostile Indians, and the incessant economic pressure to lay track faster. To fathom the enormity of the undertaking, Ambrose traveled much of the railroad’s original route, inspecting both the harsh terrain and the engineering marvels that tamed it. He populates his account with figures who, if not larger than life, are made more fully alive by their great ambition and determination. Chief among these are the Central Pacific’s “Big Four” Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Charles Crocker, and Mark Hopkins and the Union Pacific’s wily Thomas “Doc” Durant and his point man, General Grenville Dodge. For years, Ambrose had viewed these men as ruthless opportunists.

“I thought of them as robber barons,” says the eminent historian, speaking by phone from his home in Helena, Montana. “I thought they made ungodly profits and then used them in nefarious ways, especially Huntington and Stanford. But I had been taught by men who did their graduate work in the ’30s, and they just hated big business.” While conceding that the builders did reap huge fortunes, Ambrose now concludes they deserved to. “These guys went deeply in debt,” he explains. “They didn’t really risk their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, but they damn near did.” Ambrose is equally admiring of the laborers who would accomplish the seemingly impossible one day and better it the next. Chinese immigrant workers, he points out, were absolutely vital to the Central Pacific. They were called in, albeit reluctantly, after American workers kept leaving the job to search for riches in the gold and silver mines of California and Nevada. When James Strobridge, Central Pacific’s head of construction, balked at hiring the Chinese, asserting that they were too small to do such physically demanding work, Crocker reminded him that they had been strong enough to build the Great Wall of China. Before long, the company was sending recruiters to China.

Ambrose admits that most historians, like his old professors, write from a political agenda. But does he? “I used to,” he says. “It’s a different world we’re living in now. I mean, I used to care terribly about the Vietnam War. But I don’t have a political agenda anymore, other than I want young people in America, now and in the future, to understand that freedom doesn’t come free, that the blessings they’ve got by being Americans were paid for. And I want them to know who paid and how and what they did.” Warming to this subject, Ambrose continues, “For a quick example: I want them to know more about Thomas Jefferson than [his relationship with] Sally Hemmings. I want them to know that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty, and I want everyone else be they Muslim, Buddhist, Rainbow People, Protestant, Catholic, or whatever to know that their right to believe what they want to believe and worship as they choose to worship comes from Thomas Jefferson. I want them to know if they live in Wisconsin or Iowa or any of the other Louisiana Purchase states or any of the other states west of the Allegheny Mountains, the reason they get to vote for senators and congressmen and that their states are co-equal with the original 13 is because of the Northwest Ordinance. I want them to know that, and I want them to appreciate that.” A university history teacher until his retirement in 1995, Ambrose concedes that his views of history are now out of fashion on campus. “It’s not the way most academic historians teach history,” he says. “Most of them teach that Jefferson had a slave mistress and that George Washington was a slaveholder. I want them to know that George Washington led us in war and in peace. In war, he knew if he was captured, they were going to send him to London, they were going to put him on trial, they were going to find him guilty of treason and then they were going to draw and quarter him. I make sure those kids know what drawing and quartering means. Obviously, Washington’s being a slaveholder is an important part of his life and of history. But there’s a lot more.” For years, Ambrose wrote histories and biographies which were well received but which sold poorly. “I badly needed my income [from teaching],” he says. “I wrote books that got very nice reviews, but it used to be I’d be lucky if they sold 20,000 copies. I’d get a royalty check, and I could take the wife out to dinner or maybe pay for a summer off and do some research. But nothing to make me a rich man. And then Undaunted Courage is the one that just burst.” Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West was published in 1996. “At first, my editor, Alice Mayhew, didn’t want me to do the book,” Ambrose recalls. “She said, ÔNobody wants to read about dead white males.’ I said, ÔI do, Alice.’ . . . Now the book’s at two million hardback and two million paperback. So I became a rich man. But it happened to me late in life, or relatively late. I was 58 or 59 years old, and all of a sudden I had a lot of money.” He credits Mayhew for suggesting he write his current book. Indeed, he dedicates it to her. “This is the second time Alice has done this to me,” he says, with a good-natured laugh. “The first time, it cost me a decade of my life.” It was Mayhew, he explains, who talked him into doing what became a two-volume biography of Richard Nixon.

Good fortune has not appreciably altered the way Ambrose researches and writes. “I’m a Luddite, I’m afraid. I came to the computer fairly late in my career. I like to say now because it’s true that the ability to move paragraphs around and spell-check is so good that if I’d had the computer earlier, I’d have five more books. . . . My son, who now works with me, uses the computer for research. But I have no idea how to do it. I can’t even do e-mail.” (In spite of Ambrose’s own technophobia, his son has erected a fancy and useful website on his dad’s behalf at www.stephenambrose.com.) Next up for Ambrose is a history of the 15th Air Force and their B-24 Liberator bombers. “It came about because George McGovern asked me to write about his wartime career,” Ambrose says. “That was awfully tempting because here was the world’s most famous anti-bombing advocate who was a bomber pilot. Thirty-five missions. The Distinguished Flying Cross. That part of it fascinated me.” As for the Transcontinental Railroad, Ambrose says, our fascination focuses on the mammoth and awe-inspiring construction project, but it is best appreciated at a higher level: “It tied us together,” he asserts, “east and west.” Edward Morris writes on music, politics, and fiction from Nashville.

The legacy of the ancient Greeks is so overwhelming in so many areas democracy, literature, philosophy, science, mathematics, mythology, drama, art, the Olympic games it is easy to idealize them. As Charles Freeman writes, A popular image of Athens has survived in which the marble is always shining, the streets are clean, and there is a lot of time for passionate philosophical discussions about art, theater, and the meaning of life. But Freeman is keenly aware of the human reality behind the reputation and the paradoxes that accompanied the towering accomplishments. His magnificent The Greek Achievement: The Foundation of the Western World offers the general reader an excellent introduction to the subject. The author uses the best of recent scholarship and excerpts from the works of many classic sources such as Homer, Plato, Aeschylus, and Sappho, in a fast-paced narrative that covers almost 2,000 years of cultural, diplomatic, and military history.

Greek society had a rich spiritual tradition that involved a complex mythology. For example, It was typical for a new city to find a protecting god, Athena at Athens, Apollo in Corinth, for instance, and sacred areas, both inside and outside of the city were set aside for temples . . . in which to worship them. After her victory in the Persian wars, for 75 years Athens became the most important force in the Greek world. Democracy was sustained by empire; drama was an essential part of democratic participation, philosophy fostered by the experience of intense debate within a city setting. The city’s pride was enhanced by the magnificent building program on the Acropolis. But Freeman notes: Athens’ democracy depended on slavery and the fruits of empire. Democratic government did not necessarily mean benign government. The Athenian assembly could order the massacre of the entire male population of another Greek island and the enslavement of its women and children. Women were segregated and marginalized in almost every area.

Freeman explains that until recently we knew virtually nothing about the Greeks as farmers. But Ninety percent of Greeks made their living on the land and it was their surpluses which underpinned city life. He discusses the close relationship between town and country. There is no sense of an urban elite who use the countryside primarily as a leisure source and look down on the more ignorant country dweller. Such an idea comes only in Hellenistic times when poems about the countryside are written by urban poets who clearly see the countryside as something to enjoy or use as a backdrop to tales of love and seduction in shady groves. There is a fascinating discussion of the intense interest in the place of the hero that began in the eighth century. Who was the hero? How limited were his powers? Alongside heroic behavior comes the idealization of the heroic male body. The search for perfection in the human form was to prove one of the driving forces of Greek art. Homer’s epics are not concerned only with glorifying the hero. The greatness of the Iliad and Odyssey as literature lies arguably in the way they illustrate the difficulties inherent in the heroic role.

The greatest glory for the hero comes from activities which court death and yet death brings nothing but a shadowy existence in the underworld. Here is the ultimate and inexplicable human tragedy. This rich overview points out the flaw of the Greek political system was that it never developed a theory of human rights. Rights and duties were assigned not on a universal basis but on the grounds of status and sex. The author also notes that a major point to remember is the resilience of the Greek culture. As he surveys the Greeks from 1550 B.

C. to A.

D. 600, from Mycenae to the Byzantine Empire, their influence spreads to other lands, other cultures.