No-Man's Lands: One Man's Odyssey Through The Odyssey | 
| Author: Scott Huler
Publisher: Crown
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 65954
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6 x 1.2
ISBN: 140008282X
Dewey Decimal Number: 883.01
EAN: 9781400082827
ASIN: 140008282X
Publication Date: March 11, 2008
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Product Description
When NPR contributor Scott Huler made one more attempt to get through James Joyce’s Ulysses, he had no idea it would launch an obsession with the book’s inspiration: the ancient Greek epic The Odyssey and the lonely homebound journey of its Everyman hero, Odysseus.
No-Man’s Lands is Huler’s funny and touching exploration of the life lessons embedded within The Odyssey, a legendary tale of wandering and longing that could be read as a veritable guidebook for middle-aged men everywhere. At age forty-four, with his first child on the way, Huler felt an instant bond with Odysseus, who fought for some twenty years against formidable difficulties to return home to his beloved wife and son. In reading The Odyssey, Huler saw the chance to experience a great vicarious adventure as well as the opportunity to assess the man he had become and embrace the imminent arrival of both middle age and parenthood.
But Huler realized that it wasn’t enough to simply read the words on the page—he needed to live Odysseus’s odyssey, to visit the exotic destinations that make Homer’s story so timeless. And so an ambitious pilgrimage was born . . . traveling the entire length of Odysseus’s two-decade journey. In six months.
Huler doggedly retraced Odysseus’s every step, from the ancient ruins of Troy to his ultimate destination in Ithaca. On the way, he discovers the Cyclops’s Sicilian cave, visits the land of the dead in Italy, ponders the lotus from a Tunisian resort, and paddles a rented kayak between Scylla and Charybdis and lives to tell the tale. He writes of how and why the lessons of The Odyssey—the perils of ambition, the emptiness of glory, the value of love and family—continue to resonate so deeply with readers thousands of years later. And as he finally closes in on Odysseus’s final destination, he learns to fully appreciate what Homer has been saying all along: the greatest adventures of all are the ones that bring us home to those we love.
Part travelogue, part memoir, and part critical reading of the greatest adventure epic ever written, No-Man’s Lands is an extraordinary description of two journeys—one ancient, one contemporary—and reveals what The Odyssey can teach us about being better bosses, better teachers, better parents, and better people.
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| Customer Reviews:
A personal journey through Homer's Odyssey July 8, 2008
Exceptional. Read this with one eye on Homer's version and the other on Huler's. An epic journey all comes together.
What a great book!! July 4, 2008
A very interesting book. Scott Huler does a very good job of blending an ancient tale of travel and adventure with his own personal wanderings around Southern Europe. Scott's obsession with "The Odyssey" becomes the reader's obsession too. - Ray Charlton
A sheer delight! April 6, 2008
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
At age 44, having finally read James Joyce's Ulysses (which he had vowed never to do), Scott Huler immerses himself in Homer's epic tale, The Odyssey, and embarks on an adventurous six-month pilgrimage to retrace Odysseus's return from the Trojan war to Penelope and Telemachus, his wife and son, in Ithaca.
When Polyphemus the Cyclops demands to know Odysseus' identity, Odysseus replies, "My name is No-man." Later, when the Cyclops cries out, "No-man is killing me!" his fellow Cyclopes think he is not in any trouble. Hence the book's title, and Huler's determination to boldly go where No-man has gone before.
Along the way, we encounter the Lotus-eaters, the Cyclopes, the Laestrygonians, the witch Circe, the kingdom of the dead, the island of the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, the cattle of the sun, and enjoy many other episodes.
Whether The Odyssey is historical/geographical or a mythological tale imagined by a poet ("The poets always lie," said Plato), cannot be ascertained. However, Huler quotes many ancient Greek and Roman writers--Thucydides, Strabo, Herodotus, Ovid, Pausanias, Polybius--who provide a plausible itinerary for Odysseus's travels.
Reading Huler's travelogue/memoir is a sheer delight! Filled with self-deprecating humor, No-Man's Lands provides numerous chuckles and laughs. The book is more than slapstick humor, however. The author's critical analyses reveal an impressive knowledge of Homeric questions, and his sensitive judgments takes the answers he learns and sagely applies to our own lives and world.
A genial and thoughtful memoir of a modern Odysseus March 19, 2008
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
Back in 2001 author and radio commentator Scott Huler swore that he would never read James Joyce's "Ulysses" after a number of failed efforts to do so. Inevitably, soon afterwards Huler found himself a member of a reading group focused on reading "Ulysses". And Huler found himself thinking more and more about Homer's "Odyssey", the fountain from which "Ulysses" sprang. He determined to re-read "The Odyssey", but then found to his chagrin that he could not "re-read" it because he had never actually read it in the first place, beyond a junior high school exposure to the book which -- like most such high school exposures to the great classics -- was much more an exercise in escaping reading "The Odyssey". So, as a mature adult Huler began genuinely reading the epic poem and became entranced by it, to the point that he decided to undertake a journey to follow Odysseus's path across the Mediterranean and seek to better understand the places experienced and the lessons learned by the ancient Greek hero, "the man of twists and turns." These are lessons applicable to everyday life, it would seem -- not that Huler ever adopts a didactic (or even overtly "inspiring") tone. Rather, "No-Man's Lands" is pleasantly rambling.
"No-man's Lands" is Huler's tale of his journey, as much of a journey through his heart and mind as through the Mediterranean. It is good-natured and thoughtful. And along the way, the reader learns with Huler much about the real soul of "The Odyssey".
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