Books like It's Greek to Me

"It's Greek to Me" was a fun read for me. I found a copy of it in a used bookstore and bought it on the assumption that its short entries would be a quick, shallow read. To my delight, I found that in addition to a brush-up of classical stories, the book is also a goldmine of etymological phrases from Greek and Latin.Let me divide that statement in half. The main focus--something like 60%--of "It's Greek to Me" is upon telling or retelling familiar stories from the Greek and Roman worlds. For instance, the author recaps such famous figures as Plato, Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, and Horace. Each of these entries is roughly a page in length, allowing the reader to digest the information in bite-sized nuggets. The information is rewarding, and Macrone is careful to trace the influence of these stories into future (English-speaking) generations.The rest of the book is, again, an etymological goldmine. If you enjoy reading about word history, this is where the book will shine for you. Phrases such as "Eat your heart out" are traced in brief, clear prose that indicates the adventure language took to make it from Greek to our current usage. Other phrases such "All roads lead to Rome" are also addressed, though Macrone is careful to show that they are not exactly from the source (he notes when they do appear in the forms that we know them--for example, "The face that launched a thousand ships" did not appear until Marlowe).I would put this book on par with other popular accounts of word origins such as "I Love It When You Talk Retro" or "In the Land of Invented Languages". If you have read either of those (or others like them), you will enjoy this book as well.*Note: I cannot get italics to work on this review...I have put quotation marks around the longer titles to distinguish them. I do recognize that this is not following prescriptive rules.