Extensively field-tested and fine-tuned over many years, and designed specifically for a one-year course, JC McKeown's Classical Latin: An Introductory Course offers a thorough, fascinating, and playful grounding in Latin that combines the traditional grammatical method with the reading approach. In addition to grammar, paradigms, and readings, each chapter includes a variety of extraordinarily well-crafted exercises that reinforce the grammar and morphology while encouraging the joy of linguistic and cultural discovery.
JC McKeown is Professor of Classics, University of WisconsinâMadison.
To all my Latin colleagues: switch to this book! I have taught from half a dozen different Latin texts over the years, and have always wished there was something else I could be using. Finally that something else has arrived! I was pleasantly surprised at its accessibility, liveliness, and clarity. I have used it for two years now at the University of Delaware with great results. It fits extremely well into a two-semester elementary program. Each chapter features clear explanations of a manageable amount of material, with a variety of exercises ranging from simple to difficult, so the instructor can select what to give the students. The most capable students can do more difficult exercises, the average student is challenged but not overwhelmed, and the students with weaker language abilities are able to make it through the language requirement successfully. I have told all my friends in the field to try this book! --Lynn Sawlivich, University of Delaware
These days there are two types of Latin course. One of them is the traditional course and it is into this category that McKeown's book falls. The other is the inductive course, best known from the Cambridge and (less uncompromisingly) the Oxford Latin courses. McKeown's book is an admirable embodiment of the traditional methodology. . . . As could be anticipated from the author of the lively Cabinet of Roman Curiosities (2010), he eases the diet of rote learning and sentences with strong and varied injections of information about the Latin language and Roman life that entertain as much as they stimulate. I cannot think of any other course that comes close to McKeown's in this respect: we have a wonderful melange of poetry, etymology, maxims, facts bizarre and sober, in addition to much else. The book is splendidly produced. Grammar is helpfully laid out; constructions are explained with notable clarity: it is obvious that the material has been constantly redrafted in the course of repeated testing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where McKeown teaches, and it is no doubt a college market for which it will prove best adapted. It could be completed in a (pretty intensive) year. You will not do better than McKeown's book if you want the traditional approach. --James Morwood, [Wadham College], Oxford University, in The Classical Review
The publication of McKeown's Classical Latin is very exciting. It is going to be fun to teach from! It is thorough yet not pedantic; it covers all the important material in a logical fashion, and it does not have the silliness that is found in some elementary Latin texts. I am planning to adopt it for Elementary Latin (a year course, in which I think McKeown will fit very nicely) the next time I teach the class. It will be a great improvement over the text I have used for years and years. --Jane Crawford, Professor of Classics, University of Virginia
