Morales has been a guest on BBC Radio 4 Women’s Hour, and her work has been cited in the New York Times and The New Yorker. She is the author of Classical Mythology: A Very Short Introduction and Pilgrimage to Dollywood: A Country Music Road Trip Through Tennessee, which inspired an honors history course about Dolly Parton at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. Helen Morales holds the Argyropoulos Chair in Hellenic Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Witty as well as personal, Antigone Rising: The Subversive Power of the Ancient Myths is an astute social commentary on the links between ancient mythological stories and current conversations on gender identity, racism, violence, sexuality and much more. It’s for sure one of my favorite books of this year. I’m really glad I happened to spot it at the bookstore and buy it.

Even when it doesn’t feel like it, things are definitely changing and books like this are a part of that change.

There’s a lot of talk about rape, racism, fatphobia, transphobia and many more hard and distressing content but nontheless it’s also a powerful read. This is by no means an easy book to read. This is a book with many different topics like toxic diet culture relating to Hippocrates to the women controllers of ancient Greece to modern day schools and principals regulating how teenage girls dress so as to not “distract” the male teachers and students to myth of Caeneus speaking to many transgenders today. I absolutely loved this and could not put the book down.Īt 203 pages (including the index) it isn’t a very long book so I only picked it up twice before finishing it but still that’s pretty fast for me to finished any book so that only shows how absorbed I was. Classicist Helen Morales goes into issues we have today in our modern world and connects those with ancient history and myths. I bought this book simply because of the title and cover alone but when I picked it up and started reading I got so much more than that.

Antigone rising by helen morales