"Wood, who teaches English at Princeton, is not a true believer—he is an amiable skeptic with a soft spot for the oracular utterances of astrologers. But in The Road to Delphi, his erudite romp through the history of oracles, from the ancients to the soothsaying economists and physicians of our own time, Wood finds a beautifully clear picture of the complex mechanics of mythmaking and a helpful explication of the tangle of human desire and interpretation."—Laura Ciolkowski, The New York Times