THE GREEK TREASURE: A Biographical Novel of Henry and Sophia Schliemann

by Irving Stone ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 1975

Be it Michelangelo or Henry Schliemann, be it a chisel or a pick, there's always a lot of wood to chop in one of Irving Stone's factually fortified biographies of great men of obdurate vigor. And Schliemann was certainly the most single-minded of these when in middle age, rich and retired from business, he decided to uncover the city of Troy destroyed some 3000 years ago. At this time he also married the young (only seventeen) Sophia who stayed by his side in situ during the years of endless excavations, even after little Andromache and Agamemnon were born. For Schliemann it was to be ""A life sentence. . . . Sometimes I don't know which is the prisoner in this mount. Troy or myself."" But then there were the first coins, and medals and vertebrae, and later Priam's gold and silver (which the Turkish government would contest). Schliemann was an arbitrary man, stingy with Sophia and her family though no price was too great to pay for his lifework which he subsidized, while he drove himself unremittingly toward his own sepulcher. Certainly he's not the most lovable subject to read about at this predictable great length; and in all the bedrock scholarship and mounds of magma, it's hard to find the ""bosom lifting feeling"" of discovery however manifest the destiny of any book Stone has ever written.

Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1975

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1975

Categories: FICTION