Stealing Athena
A Novel
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Stealing Athena
Narrated by:
Susan Denaker
Buy Now for $33.99
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Narrated by:
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Susan Denaker
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By:
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Karen Essex
About this listen
The Elgin Marbles have been displayed in the British Museum for nearly two hundred years, and for just as long they have been the center of a raging controversy. In Stealing Athena, Karen Essex chronicles the Marbles’ amazing journey through the dynamic narratives of Mary Nisbet, wife of the Earl of Elgin, the British ambassador to Constantinople, and Aspasia, the mistress of Perikles, the most powerful man in Athens during that city’s Golden Age.
At the height of the Napoleonic Wars, the twenty-one-year-old, newly wed Countess of Elgin, a Scottish heiress and celebrated beauty, enchanted the power brokers of the Ottoman Empire, using her charms to obtain their permission for her husband’s audacious plan to deconstruct the Parthenon and bring its magnificent sculptures to England. Two millennia earlier, Aspasia, a female philosopher and courtesan, and a central figure in Athenian life, plied her wits, allure, and influence with equal determination, standing with Perikles at the center of vehement opposition to his vision of building the most exquisite monuments the world had ever seen.
Rich in romance and intrigue, greed and glory, Stealing Athena is an enthralling work of historical fiction and a window into the intimate lives of some of history’s most influential and fascinating women.©2008 Karen Essex; (P)2008 Random House Audio
Critic Reviews
“Historical fiction at its finest."
—St. Petersburg Times
"A great adventure story. . . . Essex delves deeply into the lives and times of her characters in settings as diverse as ancient Greece and 18th-century Constantinople, France and Great Britain, and her women characters are spirited and memorable.”
—The Times-Picayune
"Stealing Athena expounds on the weight of the past, the power of art, and the strength of women who exercised free will even when they had the fewest rights…. Uniquely relevant."
—Los Angeles Times
—St. Petersburg Times
"A great adventure story. . . . Essex delves deeply into the lives and times of her characters in settings as diverse as ancient Greece and 18th-century Constantinople, France and Great Britain, and her women characters are spirited and memorable.”
—The Times-Picayune
"Stealing Athena expounds on the weight of the past, the power of art, and the strength of women who exercised free will even when they had the fewest rights…. Uniquely relevant."
—Los Angeles Times
The writer, Karen Essex, deserves better reviews as she has blended the lives of two women in such a way as to alert us to the misery inflicted on the female sex in two different historical epochs - Aspasia of Ancient Greece and Mary Nisbet of 1800’s Scotland.
Karen Essex successfully captures how females have been subjected to the controlling nature of the male species and at the same time manages to give us a glimpse of life in Ancient Greece under Pericles and contrasts it with life in nineteenth century Turkey and Greece under the Ottomans.
Such a brave quest on the part of the writer! The narrator also successfully dramatises both the female and male characters - quite a feat for a female narrator to manage the male parts convincingly.
So do not be swayed by the negative reviews as you will be the poorer for not embarking on the journey that Karen Essex has created for her readers. Athena lives!
Nicholas Spartalis
Athena Lives
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