Myth
Myth: A Very Short Introduction (2004) Robert A Segal Myth is a disappointing introduction to mythology, a rather plodding book that might be termed 'wikipedia plus' - that is, it is a longer general survey with more authority than you might find online. Ultimately it is a mere enumeration of Western intellectual responses to myth, forced into a straitjacket of being reviewed through the prism of the various disciplines created by the West for the West. The whole is partially built around an extremely weak and irritating attempt to test each set of theories against the Adonis myth. It lacks the narrative coherence of, for example, Glyn Daniels' excellent short history of archaeology. The book has one, surely unintended, effect. This is the realisation that many jobsworth if brilliant thinkers, over the last two hundred or so years, have taken the limited material of the past - incomplete and whose precise context has long since been lost - in order to weave e...