lundberg's olympic wandering: time travel through greece

Part travelogue, part mythological tale, David Lundberg’s book takes the reader on a journey through time to prove that the Greek people are the modern day equivalents of the characters in the Iliad and the Odyssey. The first part of the book follows the seldom-told tale of Ulysses’s life as a young king in Greece and the events leading up to and after the Trojan War. The second half of the book focuses on Lundberg’s travels to the various Greek Islands and other parts of Greece, weaving together travel narrative, history, and culture. Lundberg masterfully utilizes historic references as a framework for introducing the reader to modern day Greece and Greek culture. The first half of the book reads as both a novella and a history book. There’s plenty of adventure, from Ulysses’s quest to find Achilles to his 10-year perilous trip home after the war. Lundberg places the reader alongside Ulysses. Readers need not know much about Greek history or Greece before they pick up this book, as everything is explained in an easy to understand manner. In the second half of the book, the reader follows Lundberg in his travels across Greece and her many islands. By using this approach to history and culture, Lundberg shows that the people of Greece embody everything that existed in Ulysses’s time. Although the few illustrations in the book serve mainly as decoration, Lundberg’s descriptions of the scenery and people provide more than enough information to paint a vivid portrait of Greece.