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One Man's Odyssey Through The Odyssey
Crown
March 2008
On Sale: March 11, 2008
304 pages
ISBN: 140008282X
EAN: 9781400082827
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
When NPR contributor Scott Huler made one more attempt to
get through James Joyce’s Ulysses, he had no idea it would
launch an obsession with the book’s inspiration: the
ancient Greek epic The Odyssey and the lonely homebound
journey of its Everyman hero, Odysseus. No-Man’s Lands is Huler’s funny and touching exploration of
the life lessons embedded within The Odyssey, a legendary
tale of wandering and longing that could be read as a
veritable guidebook for middle-aged men everywhere. At age
forty-four, with his first child on the way, Huler felt an
instant bond with Odysseus, who fought for some twenty
years against formidable difficulties to return home to his
beloved wife and son. In reading The Odyssey, Huler saw the
chance to experience a great vicarious adventure as well as
the opportunity to assess the man he had become and embrace
the imminent arrival of both middle age and parenthood. But Huler realized that it wasn’t enough to simply read the
words on the page—he needed to live Odysseus’s odyssey, to
visit the exotic destinations that make Homer’s story so
timeless. And so an ambitious pilgrimage was born . . .
traveling the entire length of Odysseus’s two-decade
journey. In six months. Huler doggedly retraced Odysseus’s every step, from the
ancient ruins of Troy to his ultimate destination in
Ithaca. On the way, he discovers the Cyclops’s Sicilian
cave, visits the land of the dead in Italy, ponders the
lotus from a Tunisian resort, and paddles a rented kayak
between Scylla and Charybdis and lives to tell the tale. He
writes of how and why the lessons of The Odyssey—the perils
of ambition, the emptiness of glory, the value of love and
family—continue to resonate so deeply with readers
thousands of years later. And as he finally closes in on
Odysseus’s final destination, he learns to fully appreciate
what Homer has been saying all along: the greatest
adventures of all are the ones that bring us home to those
we love. Part travelogue, part memoir, and part critical reading of
the greatest adventure epic ever written, No-Man’s Lands is
an extraordinary description of two journeys—one ancient,
one contemporary—and reveals what The Odyssey can teach us
about being better bosses, better teachers, better parents,
and better people.
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