This book started it all for me. It stood out in the sociology section of floor 3 at the library. They say that you can't judge a book by its cover, but often, a cover will tell you a lot about the book.

That's how it was with this one. The cover was funky, with half-finished etchings. What was written inside was even better. It was a beautiful discourse on the nature of Love. From Agathon's (it was Agathon that told of Achilles and Patroclus...wasn't it?) tale of devotion, Aristophanes' haunting fable about our "other halves" (and the interludes in between, especially the one about hiccoughs) to Socrates' speech on love "involving the mind and not the body", this is a timeless and highly accessable study.

Read it a few years ago, and have been into philosophy ever since.

Not only should this book be the literary book-fellow to any Classics student, but an absolute must for every human being on the face of the planet. Griffins' translation is not only beautifully rendered/translated but extremely funky and contemporary. It is so applicable to our own modern interpertations of life, the universe,and everything, that you will easily forget than it was written over 2,500 years ago. In addition, the book design values are astounding. The fonts, both English and Greek, are lovely that even the reader who has never studied Greek will fall in love with the flowing lines.

I picked up this book while studying 20th century Central American history because I was interested in getting a personal account of a North American visiting Nicaragua during the period of Sandinista leadership. Brentlinger's work is certainly interesting, particularly his account of a visit to a campesino artist's colony, and I enjoyed reading about his interactions with his host family and locals in Managua and various villages he visited. However, the book is suffused with the kind of naive, the-Sandinistas-can-do-no-wrong tripe that so often populates accounts of Central America written by liberal white academics. Don't get me wrong, I'm as sympathetic towards the FSLN cause as anyone who has any idea of the pre-Revolution conditions that existed in Nicaragua, and yes, the knowledge of the Reagan and Bush administrations'involvement with the Contras leaves me less than proud to be an American citizen. However, the only way to avoid these kind of horrors in the future is to understand the whole story of what happened and why, and not fall back on knee-jerk reactionism. Understanding Central America means acknowledging that none of the various factions are blameless, even the Sandinistas. For a truly well written and insightful piece on this time and place, try Salman Rushdie's THE JAGUAR SMILE or, similarly, SALVADOR, Joan Didion's account of the Salvadoran killing fields.