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Zusatztext “This is an epic tale about an epic tale. Scott Huler writes with much learning! passion and humor (if not dactylic hexameter). I can’t think of a better guide to this journey.” —A. J. Jacobs! author of The Year of Living Biblically Informationen zum Autor Scott Huler Klappentext 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. Chapter 1 No Greater Claim to Our Credence: On the Isle of the Nymph Calypso Now all the others who had managed to escape destruction were safe at home, untroubled by war or the sea. Odysseus alone, full of longing for wife and friends, was kept from returning by that beautiful nymph Calypso, the powerful goddess who hoped to make him her husband. . . . that luckless but clever man Odysseus, who far from his friends, on a lonely island at the great sea's very navel, has long been miserable. --The Odyssey, Book I I COULD START the tale of my trip at the beginning--telling you how I stuffed my backpack and was dropped at the airport by my wife, still early enough in her pregnancy that she radiated like fresh-baked bread. On a string around my neck I wore not just a charm bearing the image of an owl--Athena's symbol, for luck--but a ring of June's, one that during our courtship she used to "forget" at my house to remind me she wasn't far off. When I told her I planned to wear the Athena charm she suggested adding the ring. I had the support, she smiled, of not just mythological women. She wished me godspeed. I could tell how I flew to Istanbul and stayed overnight with friends, how the evening before I took my first bus toward Troy, my host explained my upcoming trip to a friend over a late...
