For anyone desiring to get a quick overview of Milton's Paradise Lost without having to suffer too much, I would highly recommend this book as an easy path into the work. This marks a change in the depiction of Eve in literature, focusing less on her her sin and guilt, and instead focusing on her marriage and her relationship with her husband. One also gets a glimpse into Adam and Eve's relationship, the sweet companionship they experienced, and how they cleaved together in times of trouble. One is treated to the gleaming throne of God surrounded by the heavenly angels, down to the burning pits of Hell, Lucifer and his bunch of dark fallen angels. The poem contains amazingly delightful imagery. That said, the author of this book has done an excellent job of taking the difficult-to-understand language of Paradise Lost and translating it into a narrative format that can be easily comprehended by the modern mind. Very little can be learned about its author online.
The book is not published by a large press, and seems almost homemade in a way. Knowing that the arcane language would make understanding the original poem quite difficult, I identified a book that "novelized" the poem for the benefit of modern comprehension. Since I had never before read Milton's great work, before listening to an expert's interpretation of the piece, I thought it might be instructive to read the poem itself. I knew that in reading Adam Greenblatt's book on the Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, that he would refer at length to the work and life of John Milton and his life masterpiece, the epic poem, Paradise Lost. While I still admire Mary Beard, this short volume of her work is really not worth it. She also discusses certain abuses and insults she herself has suffered for publicly speaking her mind on certain issues. She compares the pants suits of Angela Merkel and Hillary Clinton. She bounces back and forth between Greek and Roman mythology and more modern figures in the public eye. She discusses how throughout history it has been anathema for women to speak in public forums. On the bad side, it was largely boring and irrelevant.
On the good side, fortunately, this book is short, so I was over and done with it quickly. Which is why I jumped when I saw that she had recently published a short monograph on "Women & Power". After this book, I came to greatly admire Mary Beard as a personality, speaker, and author. She sheds light on antiquity in a highly entertaining and readable style. She gives many interesting tidbits on what it must have been like to live in ancient Rome, from their graffiti, to their bawdy jokes. The author has a droll sense of humor and utilizes an approach to history not solely focused on kings and war. I read her book on Rome, SPQR, about a year ago and enjoyed it thoroughly. Mary Beard is an esteemed British historian who specializes in Antiquity.
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