Carpe Diem: Put A Little Latin in Your Life (2006)

Neat little pocket guide to Roman culture and the Latin language ( )

Ok, I admit I didn't study this primer properly" (his word). ?áInstead I took the title literally, and skimmed the parts that turned out to be like a textbook. ?áUnfortunately I do not have the foundation for this: I have never succeeded in learning any foreign language, and know only the most common Latin phrases and history. ?áThis enriched that knowledge, but to actually learn Latin I would need an audio component, exercises, and a guide - all of which are missing here.

The best bits of this, imo, are the vocabulary list, and the list of literary devices, near the end. ?áThe worst aspect is the constant advice to 'say' a passage - with no clue of phonetics given.

It is kinda sorta interesting sometimes. ?áIf you can get an audio version (?) from your public library, listen to it in the background of chores, and pause & replay the bits that interest you." ( )

If you come into this book thinking you'll walk away with an accelerated sense of Latin, you'll be sorely disappointed. Mount spends a significant amount of time discussing the declension of words, without ever explaining (unless I managed to miss it) what that means or why the reader should be inspired to care. The book jumps from topic to topic in an obvious attempt to avoid boredom, but the end result is a disorganized book that doesn't help make its case that anyone can become a classics expert.

This, of course, isn't really a fair assessment. The idea that one can walk away from this skinny volume and say, "Veni, vidi, vici," is ridiculous. I can only blame NPR for setting my expectations to an absurdly high level. It's not a bad book, by any stretch of the imagination. Some of the trivia and digressions in the book can be rather interesting, and the book might serve well as a handy reference volume or refresher course for someone who already knows what they're doing. For my purposes, however, it was less than successful. ( )

Now this book was full of cupiditas. Its goal is to serve as a primer for the noobs, as well as serve as a review for the dwindling number of grown-up school children who had studied Latin. It's full of corny anecdotes and examples as well has some expected, mind-numbing grammar. The lazy (like me) can skip the various figures of speech and simply enjoy all the clever examples of Latin words/phrases still in use today. Well worth a future re-reading. ( )

This was a fun book to read. I took five years of Latin in high school, and I enjoyed delving back into the subject. Harry Mount's intention was presumably to bring people into the classics web, but there is a lot for the person who still retains some familiarity with Latin's declensions and conjugations. The grammar never becomes boring because Mount tells stories of his growing up, investigates Greek and Roman columns, complains about wankers, and displays a large list of Latin writing devices. The one missing thing is an index. I wanted to relook at the chapter on gerunds and gerundives and a had a problem finding it. I thought it might be in the vicinity of the ablative absolute, which I found every time I reopened the book. But, it's located between the chapter on the fifth declension nouns and a funny one on Bertie Wooster's Classical Education--Latin in English literature. I was wondering whether I might do some alternate translating of gerundives, and then I thought back to the time where I used Latinate phrasing in English composition class. My retort was that I was just following the Latinate style of English authors during the Augustan age (my favorites were the essays of Addison and Steele).
This book is highly recommended for both the newcomer and casual Latinist. ( )