Don't be fooled by the gorgeous and provocative cover. Mayor has some really intriguing hypotheses to offer and has backed them up with apparently solid scholarship but Princeton University Press has done the author no favors. The book is unbelievably poorly designed - talk about widows and orphans - the maps are unreadable and the photographs rarely appear on the same page as the the relevent text. Mayor is not an especially accomplished writer but I feel sure a competent editor could have saved her from herself. At the very least they should had nixed the frequent paranthetical references to other chapters of the book which are deeply annoying. As eager as I am/was for the information contained here I have not been able to force myself past the third chapter. Mayor's theories are indeed exciting and worthy of discussion, one wishes her publisher had worked as hard at producing a worthwhile book as the author evidently did in researching it.

This book presents the idea that ancients were well aware of fossils, and discusses their interpretations of them. It shows how different members of society tried to interpret them in different ways (most interpreted them as being signs of giants and monsters, but some took this to show divine origins, and others took it to be part of natural history). The ideas are very interesting, and the history of the importance of different fossilized bones in different cities is quite exciting. My only complaint is that the books seems to be quite repetitive. Not only are the points that the author is trying to make repetitive, but she even repeats some of the stories she tells several times. A good editor could have trimmed out 1/3 of the book. All in all, a good book. Interesting, thorough, and decently referenced. For anyone interested in classics or paleontology, this is a good buy.

Adrienne Mayor makes a very plausible case noting the significance of fossils to ancient Greeks, Romans and other early peoples of the Near East and other parts of Asia, most notably the Central Asian Gobi Desert. She may sound repetitive, but she does an excellent job organizing her facts and making her case as persuasive as it is. Students of classical archaeology will have to consider her novel hypothesis in any future work on ancient mythology. It's a pity Princeton University Press hasn't done an excellent job marketing this fine book. Let's hope it earns the wide readership it deserves soon.