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Start giftingAlexander the Great
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Learn moreAlexander's behavior was conditioned along certain lines—heroism, courage, strength, superstition, bisexuality, intoxication, cruelty. He bestrode Europe and Asia like a supernatural figure.
In this succinct portrait of Alexander the Great, distinguished scholar and historian Norman Cantor draws on the major writings of Alexander's contemporaries as well as the most recent psychological and cultural studies to illuminate this most legendary of men—a great figure in the ancient world whose puzzling personality greatly fueled his military accomplishments. Cantor describes Alexander's ambiguous relationship with his father, Philip II of Macedon; his oedipal involvement with his mother, the Albanian princess Olympias; and his bisexuality. He traces Alexander's attempts to bridge the East and West, the Greek and Persian worlds, using Achilles, hero of the Trojan War, as his model. Finally, Cantor explores Alexander's view of himself in relation to the pagan gods of Greece and Egypt.
More than a biography, Cantor's Alexander the Great is a psychological rendering of a man of his time.
Norman F. Cantor (1929–2004) was emeritus professor of history, sociology, and comparative literature at New York University. His academic honors included appointments as a Rhodes Scholar, Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellow at Princeton University, and Fulbright professor at Tel Aviv University. His earlier books include Inventing the Middle Ages, nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Civilization of the Middle Ages, one of the most widely read narratives of the Middle Ages in the English language.
Bronson Pinchot, Audible’s Narrator of the Year for 2010, has won Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Awards, AudioFile Earphones Awards, Audible’s Book of the Year Award, and Audie Awards for several audiobooks, including Matterhorn, Wise Blood, Occupied City, and The Learners. A magna cum laude graduate of Yale, he is an Emmy- and People’s Choice-nominated veteran of movies, television, and Broadway and West End shows. His performance of Malvolio in Twelfth Night was named the highlight of the entire two-year Kennedy Center Shakespeare Festival by the Washington Post. He attended the acting programs at Shakespeare & Company and Circle-in-the-Square, logged in well over 200 episodes of television, starred or costarred in a bouquet of films, plays, musicals, and Shakespeare on Broadway and in London, and developed a passion for Greek revival architecture.
Reviews
“[An] incomparable mix of insight and cogency…Military exploits (in Alexander’s case, of course, military talents) are excitingly revivified, and honesty is the hallmark of Cantor’s appreciation of Alexander’s relationship with his longtime male lover, Hephaestion. A book that does the biographical art proud.”
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