Hearing Homer's Song is a biography of the famous classicist Milman Parry. The book is written by a professional writer for a popular audience, but nevertheless merits scholarly attention because K. approaches the topic with historical precision grounded in a Herculean amount of archival research. This offers a better insight into how and why Parry revolutionised Homeric scholarship and also challenges our disciplinary approach to the history of Classics.

The various stages of Parry's life are narrated chronologically. Starting with his youth in California, almost everything one finds in the first section is new information and, as K. shows, is relevant for Parry's ‘big idea’ about Homer. In chapters about Paris and the Sorbonne Homerists will be interested in the discussion of Parry's relationship to his three mentors (Croiset, Puech, Meillet), which allows for a better understanding of how his early work on Homer proceeded. The section of the book devoted to the time Parry spent at Harvard and in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia retell the better-known part of his life. The most useful work here is K.'s chronological mapping of Parry's fieldwork in the Balkans and Albert Lord's retelling of it in the previously unknown letters. The final section deals with Parry's premature death, which according to K. was most probably not a suicide, but an accident; or, perhaps, Parry was killed by his wife. K. is careful enough not to reproduce the myth that Parry bought the pistol to protect himself from the Balkan barbarians. Interpolated within the description of Parry's life are summaries of his work on Homer and other topics in Homeric scholarship. These are well informed, but too general to be of interest to scholars. Lastly, it needs to be mentioned that the book is a fascinating read, written in an engaging and accessible style.

K. went a long way to uncover what he could about Parry, but along the way he mostly found other voices. Albert Lord is one obvious example without whom Parry's work would probably remain unknown. Another voice, now silent, was Parry's wife Marian who sacrificed everything for her husband. She initially financed his doctoral programme and took care of the family so that he could focus solely on his work, and possibly on other women. K. shows that without Marian there most likely would not have been a revolution in Homeric scholarship. There are other forgotten figures that one discovers in the biography, such as Matija Murko, a scholar of Slavic studies who carried out a similar project before Parry, or Nikola Vujnović, the tireless local guide and interpreter. Unlike Marian's, their stories are only mentioned, but they are there, elucidating that it was also women, interpreters and local scholars who helped advance the discipline, even if these individuals remain unrecognised or intentionally silenced. This is perhaps the most important message that a reader comes away from the book with; and this is where we need to ask ourselves, should we not uncover these supressed narratives. Hearing Homer's Song shows that it might well be worth the effort.