The many readers of Wellesley College professor Lefkowitz's book Not Out of Africa (1996) discovered what her academic colleagues had known for decades—she has an encyclopedic grasp of classical literature and a knack for lucid if austere prose. But where that book addressed the intensely contemporary issue of Afrocentrism, this one takes a more Olympian perspective. Twentieth-century interpreters from Freud to Joseph Campbell plumbed Greek myths for their insights into human character, but Lefkowitz suggests the myths have something to say about divinity itself. Is it possible that Greeks actually believed in their pantheon of flawed and fallible gods, with their deceptions, adulteries and petty quarrels? Lefkowitz insists that we take that possibility seriously. She offers chapter-long retellings of texts like the Iliad and the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, showing how central the gods are to those texts. (Unfortunately, readers not already familiar with Greek literature may struggle to keep up.) The gods, she says, are distant and only rarely interested in individual mortals, and divine justice moves slowly. Yet for Lefkowitz this "religion for adults" is commendably realistic, delivering little comfort "other than the satisfaction that comes from understanding what it is to be human." (Nov.)
