Tibet, Homer and heroes

I recently got added TIVO to my cable TV set up, and I have found the instant downloads from Netflix delightful, especially for documentaries. I strongly recommend Blindsight, a film about a school for the blind in Lhasa Tibet which was founded by two Germans, and an expedition trekking in the Himalayas led by an American man who was the first blind person to summit Mt. Everest. You can see more about the sponsoring group at the web site for Braille without Borders. Not the least interesting part of the story is how these foreigners were allowed to build a school within Communist Tibet, where the culture still treats the blind as lepers, people who have been punished for the bad karma of their previous lives.

My other new gadget is an iPod Nano. I downloaded several new non-fiction audiobooks, including The War that Killed Achilles, which provides a fascinating new perspective on the anti-war themes in Homer’s reworking of the classic “heroic” epic, including evidence from new excavations at Troy and new scholarship about the Indo-European roots of early Greek mythology. The author, Caroline Alexander, has written before about Ernest Shackleton and the story of how Captain Bligh survived the mutiny on the Bounty.