Crete: Discovering the 'Great Island'

by John Freely

Crete is a major travel destination with two million visitors per year. This guide is the product of a long summer the author spent living in a crumbling Venetian tower, explorer every inch of the island for future travelers. Packed with history, myth and travelogue, this should be an indispensable guide for all travelers to Crete. Included inside are maps and detailed itineraries that cover all the must-see cities, palaces, churches and places of historical and cultural significance on the island.

296 pages, Paperback

First published April 21, 1998

About the author

John Freely was born in 1926 in Brooklyn, New York to Irish immigrant parents, and spent half of his early childhood in Ireland. He dropped out of high school when he was 17 to join the U. S. Navy, serving for two years, including combat duty with a commando unit in the Pacific, India, Burma and China during the last year of World War II. After the war, he went to college on the G. I. Bill and eventually received a Ph.D. in physics from New York University, followed by a year of post-doctoral study at Oxford in the history of science. He worked as a research physicist for nine years, including five years at Princeton University. In 1960 he went to İstanbul to teach physics at the Robert College, now the Boğaziçi University, and taught there until 1976. He then went on to teach and write in Athens (1976-79), Boston (1979-87), London (1987-88), İstanbul (1988-91) and Venice (1991-93). In 1993 he returned to Boğaziçi University, where he taught a course on the history of science. His first book, co-authored by the late Hilary Sumner-Boyd, was Strolling Through İstanbul (1972). Since then he has published more than forty books.

Reviews

[Paula · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great writing, great history, great maps, but suffers from lack of any illustrations/photographs.