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Pressfield is that most rare of writers, those who so clearly and so poetically tell a major tale that all who read it are forever changed. That a man can understand the hearts of women and communicate their lives so beautifully and powerfully, is rarest in the extreme. I deliberately took a long time to finish the book, to savor every morsel. Do yourself the great service to read this book at once.

Between my best friend and myself, we almost read the print off the pages of our first "Last of the Amazons" book. I bought a second copy for another friend, and had to read it again (the 3rd time!) before I could give it up. Pressfield's book aroused my curiosity, and I found myself researching amazons online. I found, to my great surprise, that there were indeed amazons. Graves of women buried with their weapons have been found in the area of the Black Sea. Ancient pot shards show engravings of warrior women, with their strange head caps, engaged in battle. A statue of a woman, "The Last Amazon," can be found on the island of Lesbos. This woman was Maroula (holding a sword), who fought with the Greeks against Turkey in the 14th century. Pressfield's amazons lived a horse culture, with strings of ponies, much like the Mongols. He brings the amazons to life in a completely believable way. Pressfield has fired my imagination, and I have taken a great interest in what we have discovered about the amazons. I am not sure any book of fiction has ever affected me in such a dramatic fashion, and been so much fun to read to boot.

Another solid Pressfield entry. He does a wonderful job of recreating history in a way that keeps it interesting and easy to follow while attempting to drop in the historical context and information. Creating characters and writing stories is difficult enough without needing to insure you're not veering too far away from historical/mythological accuracy and Pressfield is a master. I recommend this to anyone who's into the subject matter presented or has read any of his previous works because this is right up there with his previous works.

Pressfield has here done a very nice job of recreating what might have been the world of the Amazons on the southern steppes of today's Russia, and that clash of cultures which may have occurred when Bronze Age Greek adventurers stumbled across these warrior women, as seems to be echoed in the remnants of old Greek legend. But his story is over the top in the end. He takes too long to spin out the tale and the complex artifice he has adopted for the telling (a narrator recounting what she has seen and heard from other participants in their own "voices") works against the matter. More, his characters never spring fully to life. I could not easily differentiate Damon from Elias, or even the idealized Theseus (with whom I could never entirely empathise) from Prince Atticus, while Eleuthera and Selene and Antiope and Hypolita (spelling?) all seemed to me little more than archetypes. The writing, indeed, was expansively poetic and in places well-wrought enough to move me but there was too much of this, as well. Over and over again, the narrators, Selene or Damon, through the voice of Bones, repeat the same chant-like litany of names and peoples. It grew to be too much and overly distracting.

In sum, I am led to conclude that Pressfield, riding the crest of his recent successes, has here let himself go artistically . . . and who is to nay-say such a successful writer? Unwilling or unable to bring his narrative to a natural conclusion, he lets it spin out too long, with apparent ending after apparent ending, until the reader (or this reader at least) grows tired of the effort. And while the first half was brisk and enjoyable to read, the second, with its war against Athens, was much slower, despite the action on the field, and marred by an overemphasis on the military campaign to the detriment of its participants' characters. Indeed even the exploits of the heroes (Theseus with broken arm and leg and other assorted wounds, including a nearly smashed skull, dashing about in heroic battle) seemed a bit of a stretch.

Pressfield did, however, do a very fine job of bringing the legendary Amazon nation itself to life, even if his characters were less than real, but the unfurling of events seemed stilted and overly stylized, while it was hard to engage with the characters so that the freshness of the Greek legend seemed somehow to be lost. (I thought Robert Graves did it better in his now nearly forgotten HERCULES, MY SHIPMATE which recounted the adventures of Jason and his Argonauts, in roughly the same region, as they searched for the Golden Fleece.) It's painful to be so critical here since I am a fan of Pressfield since GATES OF FIRE, but I suppose it is hard to sustain the champion's pace all the time. This is a good one, worth reading if you love legend and adventure in the form of historical fiction, but it's not the best Pressfield I've read.

SWM
author of The King of Vinland's Saga

Deep in the mythic origins of the Indo-European peoples, from the "Aryans" of India to the Achaeans of Greece to the Latium of Italy, to the Goths of Northern Europe, are tales of conflict between the heroic invaders and the profoundly different indigenous who inhabit what became the European homelands. In some cases these mythic forms follow the Titan vs Olympian or Giant vs Asa pattern; at other junctures specific tales of conflict are retold.

In this book Pressfield gives his iteration of the story of Theseus, the mythic prince of Athens, and Hippolyta, the queen of the Amazons. Pressfield has a keen mind for cultural identity and differences, and the skeleton of this story is fleshed out with the contrast between the communitarian, nomdadic, matriarchal Amazons; and the patriarchal, propertied, agricultural, hierarchical Greek society. What happens when Hippolyta is taken captive back to Greece and the Athenian women begin unbinding their hair? Find out in this enjoyable read from one of the foremost authors of historical fiction.