Thirteen lectures on various myths by Joseph Campbell.

First, I would like to make it clear that I did enjoy this book. The essays were both interesting, and informative - they gave a lot of food for thought. They were taken from a documentary (if I'm not mistaken, Mythos I and Mythos II?) shown on PBS some years ago. This book contained a good deal of artwork and pictures, going hand in hand with what Campbell was discussing - being printed in black and white, a bit of the artistic grandeur was lost.

I didn't give the book a higher rating, simply because I had some difficulty with the way the book was put together. Beyond the fact that the physical copy I was reading was falling apart in a few places, I felt that the transcription could have been edited better. Some of the essays went off in different directions and were a little bit hard to follow. Furthermore, the book could have been arranged in a bit more of a coherent manner. ( )

Kind of obtuse at times, but pretty interesting in spots. ( )

For Joseph Campbell this book is fairly accessible. It's apparently a companion book to a series of programs he did for PBS near the end of his life. Because it's an overview of myth from the earliest times up through the medieval Grail stories it did help me finally see some of the points that Campbell was making in other writings of his that I had previously read. However one needs to take the conclusions in the first part of the book with a grain of salt as our discoveries in the last twenty years about early man and even the beginnings of civilizations have changed some expert's opinions about the lives of these peoples. Also the text seemed to, at times, refer to illustrations that may have been used in the TV lecture but didn't make it into the book. Still, not a bad starting point to learn about Campbell's views on mythology.

Joseph Campbell opens a window into the history of man's spirituality and puts it all in perspective. ( )