Greek Architecture and Its \t\t Sculpture

This overview aimed at the general reader is dense but fast-moving, \t\t despite its occasional detours into musty scholarly controversies. Jenkins \t\t focuses almost exclusively on temples and tombs whose artifacts can be seen at \t\t the British Museum, where he is senior curator in the Department of Greek and \t\t Roman Antiquities. This arbitrary framework turns out to be as good as any for \t\t a long view of ancient Greek buildings and sculpture, given the breadth of the \t\t museum's holdings. Jenkins's accounts of the Parthenon, the Temple of Artemis \t\t at Ephesos and half a dozen other sites are wrapped in deft capsule histories \t\t of the political situations that gave rise to them. Hundreds of mostly color \t\t photos and diagrams, smartly laid out for easy reference to the corresponding \t\t text, usually make the most obscure of his points comprehensible—his theory \t\t of how the drainage from the roof of the Artemision Temple worked, for example. \t\t A few times Jenkins discusses, in somewhat excruciating detail, questions \t\t unlikely to excite the nonspecialist (e.g., the apparently passionate debate \t\t among scholars about exactly how many columns were in that same Artemision \t\t Temple). But for the most part, the smart design and the author's obvious \t\t enthusiasm for his subject make this an accessible and lively survey. \t\t (Jan. 15)