CROSSING THE WINE-DARK SEA: Journeys Through Ancient Literature, non-fiction from the translation giantess

CROSSING THE WINE-DARK SEA: Journeys Through Ancient Literature
EMILY WILSON
Liveright (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Non-Fiction For the week ending September 16, 2026

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: "An enthralling and profoundly relevant book." —Salman Rushdie

"I adored reading these joyful, illuminating, and engrossing journeys through ancient literature." —Madeline Miller

From the most celebrated translator of our time comes a visionary exploration of how translation reshapes and enriches our understanding of the ancient world.

In this sharp and often entertaining tour through antiquity, Emily Wilson—whose renditions of Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad have captured a generation’s imagination—explores the complicated terrain of reading and writing about the ancient past. Drawing on twenty years of scholarship and teaching, Wilson explores the difficult choices that translators must make, the pleasures of finding new solutions to old problems, and the inevitable frustrations of never fully capturing what is in the original work.

Across chapters that range from the politics of Helen of Troy to the obscenities of Aristophanes, from Roman imitation of Greek models to contemporary debates over “foreignizing” and “domesticizing” styles, Wilson examines how modern norms of gender, sexuality, violence, humor, and power complicate our readings of ancient works, and how translation always risks denaturing what is unique and strange about the ancient world.

Brilliant, erudite, and yet accessible to readers with no classical background, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea is at once an introduction to the wonders of Greek and Roman literature, a manifesto for the value of translation in a rapidly changing world, and an invitation to encounter ancient cultures anew.

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My Review: What I expected was more jabbing at Christopher Nolan for his 3.25/4 master's thesis on the subject of "How The Odyssey Reflects the 21st Century's Everlasting Love for Homeric Misogyny." I did not get that. What I did NOT expect was her comparing Aristophanes in translation to Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B in their "WAP" music video by saying "...his linguistic effects depend, like theirs, on the artful manipulation of rhythm and sound in words and imagery."

I seriously doubt her father, eminent Victorianist A.N. Wilson, would approve of his first-born child even knowing what any of that meant...I was, I confess, the mildest bit shocked. (I sat with flycatcher-mouth for five minutes.)

So, well, Author Emily Wilson does not travel by any more conventional a route here, discussing the weird and wonderful (except Lucretius, Satanic forefather of poetical obscurantism *ptooptoo*sign of the horns*) world of ancient imaginations as recorded in their stories than she did when she asked "tell me about a complicated man." And that decision has honestly received far, far more attention that it merited, mostly because it dares to be clear and to express an accurate assessment of the story that follows. I think her honesty in choosing the use of the word "slave" throughout her translation alone gives an excellent reason for the existence of this book.

The ancient world whose literature has made Author Emily's career was so incredibly unlike our own world that it seems to me the term "translation" is too mild, almost dismissive, when applied to the task of explanation and explication it masks. No basic assumptions are shared; no ideas about humanity, about the manner in which the world goes about its work, remains in common. What does remain in common is human nature, human emotions, humanness itself. Language and culture are not the same but the creatures creating them are.

I found the reading experience very illuminating. I will say that someone from the intellectual background, with the education, and leading the professorial life she has, is not going to come across as just folks or someone you'd meet in the canned food aisle of the Walmart. I would be shocked to see her in Walmart, given the scolding she dished out to Nolan for filming his beautiful-looking but brovian story in Western Sahara. Intersectionality is very much on ortholefty lines. I'm not knocking her! I too am more ortholefty than centrist, so yay...but it really shows. Not everyone will like it.

Not everyone should. I want Author Emily's brave new world with its people who are open to seeing the strangeness of the past clearly and honestly and still not Revering, not at all rejecting, its truth, to come to pass. Now I need to read Iliad to see what she does with Achilles and Patroclus.

I have high hopes. Among my higher hopes are that you'll pick up this tendentious work of recontextualization, recentering, and renewal of our human roots.

ISLAND AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD: The Forgotten History of Easter Island, new data and modern analysis change the game

ISLAND AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD: The Forgotten History of Easter Island
MIKE PITTS
Mariner Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A vital and timely work of historical adventure and reclamation by British archaeological scholar Mike Pitts—a book that rewrites the popular yet flawed history of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and uses newly unearthed findings and documents to challenge the long-standing historical assumptions about the manmade ecological disaster that caused the island’s collapse.

Rapa Nui, known to Western cultures as Easter Island for centuries, has long been a source of mystery. While the massive stone statues that populate the island’s landscape have loomed in the popular Western imagination since Europeans first set foot there in 1722, in recent years, the island has gained infamy as a cautionary tale of eco-destruction. The island’s history as it’s been written tells of Polynesians who carelessly farmed, plundered their natural resources, and battled each other, dooming their delicate ecosystem and becoming a warning to us all about the frailty of our natural world.

For too long, people have imposed their own theories on this extraordinary place and its inhabitants. Thor Heyerdahl, after his famous Kon-Tiki expedition, claimed the island had been discovered by light-skinned people from South America, believing only they could have been capable of travelling there and building the statues. Erich von Däniken took it to greater extremes, saying the statues had been carved by aliens. More recently, Jared Diamond's theory of ecocide—that Islanders destroyed their world by cutting down all the trees—has become popular as a vital message about the need to conserve our planet's resources.

But what if that history is wrong?

In The Island at the Edge of the World, archaeological writer and scholar Mike Pitts offers a direct challenge to the orthodoxy of Rapa Nui, bringing to light new research and documents that tell a dramatic and surprising story about what really led to the island’s downfall. Relying on the latest archaeological findings, he paints a vastly different portrait of what life was like on the island before the first Europeans arrived, investigating why a Polynesian people who succeeded for centuries throughout the South Pacific supposedly failed to thrive in Rapa Nui. Pitts also unearths the vital story of one of the first anthropologists to study Rapa Nui, an Oxford-trained iconoclast named Katherine Routledge, who was instrumental in collecting firsthand accounts from the Polynesians living on Rapa Nui in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But though Routledge’s impressive scholarship captured the oral traditions of what life had been like pre-1722, her work was widely dismissed because of her gender, her reliance on indigenous perspectives, and her conclusions which contradicted her historical peers.

A stunning work of revisionism, this book raises critical questions about who gets to write history and the stakes of ignoring that history’s true authors. Provocative and illuminating, The Island at the Edge of the World will change the way people think about Easter Island, its colonial legacy, and where the blame for its devastation truly lies.

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My Review: An archaeologist with access to twenty-first century morals and mores and technology is not going to write with kindness towards the previous generations' conclusions. They're rooted in outdated assumptions, using techniques that feel shockingly cursory to modern sensibilities; most shocking is the unquestioning racism of so very much of the analysis made by earlier generations.

A third, the first third, of the book relays those earlier analyses with what felt to me as condign levels of condemnation or disagreement, couched in evocative language. If you're offering a different light on past data with newer data and previously unavailable technology, casting shade is inevitable. Why not begin with tendentious tones? Many cavil at this. I do not.

After bringing attention to, in the second third, an underknown and too-little celebrated Katherine Routledge and her astute observations and contextualizations of the society and culture of the island, Pitts goes into the modern archaeology and emerging understanding of Rapa Nui. It's a paradigm shift, and we're seeing it in its earliest days.

I found the book as a whole fascinating, creating a gestalt of scholarly opinion's mechanisms of change as evidence...and society's changing mores...demand. It is not a simple bowing to the winds of fashion as the reactionaries and recidivists with political axes to grind insist. It is the scientific method at work, correcting its data to account for developments across all fronts of scholarship. No "Truth" is immutable, scary as many people find that fact. Fixing thoughts into cages of ideology is never permanent. Examining data, analyzing orthodoxy's tenets, is how Einstein blew open the ideas of physics...out came cell phones, computers, the entire internet.

I won't pretend I was completely fascinated during the whole read. It was a slog to read the archaeology jargon but it yielded a really fascinating new understanding of a place most of us are intrigued by. More than that, though, this is a perfect example of how science works: take a data set, examine it, add to it, and analyze both the before and after data sets. Present conclusions as "this new data refutes/supports previous data; the current, amended data set supports/refutes the following conclusions."

It's a message I like, I support, and I choose to amplify.

RADICAL ANTIQUITY: Free Love Zoroastrians, Farming Pirates, and Ancient Uprisings, always good to learn our ancestors had problems with authoritarians too

RADICAL ANTIQUITY: Free Love Zoroastrians, Farming Pirates, and Ancient Uprisings
CHRISTOPHER B. ZEICHMANN
Pluto Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$20.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A groundbreaking history of radically democratic societies in antiquity

When you think of Ancient Greece and Rome, what do you imagine? The Acropolis and the Colosseum? Perhaps the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, and the rule of the Caesars? This well-trodden history of great thinkers, military leaders, and early state formation in the classical world enthralls us still, but it tells only half the story…

Radical Antiquity takes you on a journey in search of anarchy, statelessness, and social experimentation in the Graeco-Roman world. Sweeping across the Mediterranean from the time of the first Olympic Games until the emergence of Islam, Christopher B. Zeichmann tells the stories of escaped slaves, pirates, and religious sects—all of whom sought a more egalitarian way of life. This history from below brings the experiences of common and marginal people out of obscurity and radically expands our understanding of social and political life in the classical world.

“Unearthing the ancient world’s anarchist cultures, Zeichmann presents a compelling argument that authority may itself have always been the real aberration. Highly recommended” - Alan Moore, writer, activist, performer

“An inspirational masterpiece … Will transform the way you think about history, and the possibilities for human liberty”—William Arnal, Professor, University of Regina

“Wonderfully informative and a pleasure to read” - Uri Gordon, editor, Freedom

Christoper B. Zeichmann is a professor of history and religious studies at Toronto Metropolitan University. He is the author of The Roman Army and the New Testament and Queer Readings of the Centurion at Capernaum.

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My Review: A book by an academic and a leftist and an historian that does not require a twelve-cylinder brain concentration-turbocharged to 1000 horsepower to comprehend.

Honest.

It's examining the records we have from an interpretive point of view that does not assume all meaning is on the surface, or even near it; we know, as internet-savvy information consumers, the "just the facts" approaches used in days of yore made the immense leap of faith that the ancient writers cared about or could reliably discern only "facts" from such data as they received on a given subject. We know better than to accept one version of events as the only truth. It's something that this book contends with, that recovery of more complete data by accounting for bias in recording and further distorting bias in later preservation of the information about ancient peoples.

As this exercise of judgment and evaluation is literally the author's day job, I'm inclined to believe he is doing it in as much honest and fair evaluation of what's there as is possible. In other words I feel satisfied he is not just making shit up as he goes along.

It is very enjoyable to have data that suggests we-the-people have always been ready to ignore, co-opt, or simply pretend to obey our governing class when it has suite our needs. This lesson is very useful at any time; it is, however, particularly timely now.

Partake of Author Zeichmann's amusing prose detailing supremely timely reminders that the consent of the governed can always be revoked.