This is not a bad book. It is a standard, fairly decent introduction to mythology that's a heck of a lot better than Edith Hamilton. The reason why I give it one star is the price. It is not worth more than 45 dollars. Very few books are, and the ones that are, have hard covers. This is a disgraceful ripoff and there is absolutely no excuse for it. Morford, Leonardson, and especially the PUBLISHER should be ashamed. Yes, the book is well-done, with pretty pictures, but it's SOFTCOVER. It's worth perhaps twenty dollars, maybe thirty at most. It is a very typical example of the utter sliminess of the textbook shell game. Years ago, it once had a reasonable price. Then, when the publisher realized that it was being assigned as a textbook, they raised the price to a ridiculous level, and produced - and continue to produce - more editions so that any old edition you get will be slightly off pagewise. A minor rearranging of contents occurs to justify dupes buying the new edition thus to make the old editions worthless. Take a stand. Do not buy this book. Professors, do not assign it. If your professor assigns it, request that you may use an old version which you will be able to find for five dollars online. The changes in the book are NOT essential enough to justify this gross piracy.
By the way -- I'm a graduate student studying Greek and Roman history, religion, and literature at Berkeley. I believe I am fairly qualified, then, to make this argument. The price of this book is a disgusting shame and should not be tolerated.

This was a textbook assigned to me in my Classical Mythology course in college. I very much enjoyed working my way through it. It talked about everything in extensive detail and is pretty much what you'd expect of a textbook on Classical Mythology. Rather, I would like to explain why it didn't get five stars. When the authors quote the translations they did of classical works like the Homeric Poems or Greek tragedies, they certainly took poetic license with some of the lines. It was a very mediocre job of translation and you can see a few lines of modern day slang thrown in here and there (ex. "decked out like a corpse"). Decked out? This isn't 2003, this is thousands of years ago for goodness sakes. The other problem is that every once in a while, the authors will slip in their opinions of Christianity and how it is rediculous, though they don't say that in so many words. This is a book about a dead religion, it is NOT about the origins of Christianity and I wish the authors would have remembered that. The comments that they make at the end of certain chapters can be very offensive to the religious Christian. If you can look past these flaws it is certainly a good overview of everything Classical Mythology.