|
Titles of British books that are dumbed down or ramped up for the American market.
I just finished one, the excellent Why Homer Matters by Adam Nicolson. Except that the original title was The Mighty Dead, so much more evocative and taken from a Keats' sonnet when Keats is a hook for Nicolson's exegesis. Obviously the brains thought that Keats would be lost on the dumb Yanks.
And I've just started one, Mary Beard's The Fires of Vesuvius. About the destruction of Pompeii in AD 79 when Vesuvius erupted, amirite? Except that it's about Pompeii before Vesuvius erupted, as the original title, Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town indicates. But clearly they felt they had to make it more exciting for the yokels over here even if by doing so they misrepresented what the book was about.
|