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"Myths are usually seen as stories from the depths of time--fun and fantastical, but no longer believed by anyone. Yet, as Philip Ball shows, we are still writing them--and still living them--today. From Robinson Crusoe and Frankenstein to Batman, many stories written in the past few centuries are commonly, perhaps glibly, called "modern myths." But Ball argues that we should take that idea seriously. Our stories of Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Sherlock Holmes are doing the kind of cultural work that the ancient myths once did. Through the medium of narratives that all of us know in their basic outline and which have no clear moral or resolution, these modern myths explore some of our deepest fears, dreams, and anxieties. We keep returning to these tales, reinventing them endlessly for new uses. But what are they really about, and why do we need them? What myths are still taking shape today? And what makes a story become a modern myth?"--back cover
About the author
Philip Ball is a freelance writer and broadcaster and was an editor at
Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including
H2O: A Biography of Water,
Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour,
The Music Instinct, and
Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything. His book
Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball is also a presenter of
Science Stories, the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. He is the author, most recently, of
The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens, also published by the University of Chicago Press. He lives in London.
