In the brilliant penultimate chapter she meditates on an ancient compendium of jokes, the philogelos. Admittedly, i'm a cultural relativist, but still i think that some of the examples she cites are still funny--funnier than she thinks.

Mary beard's book shows that romans applied humor more broadly than greeks. The romans found many things that we find humorous today, humorous in the olden times. Beard is a well-regarded historian with a long beard.

This is considered a great book of western civilization. Few people know of godel’s work and do see the anxiety of leaving any work undone. I wish there was some metric amazon or publishers would use.

Dead souls in the yale edition is a masterpiece. As the story unfolds understanding what exactly a dead soul is and where its usefulness only makes things slightly less bizarre. Maybe dead souls and the petersburg tales have very different styles--i'l...  Read More

Humor, sense and gusto totally trampled by this particularly flawed translation. Do yourself a favor and stay away from the many publishing houses trying to represent his work through the prevar/volokhonsky duo.