21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Enjoyable read, begs a full treatment for the subject, January 17, 2003
Highly enjoyable, but a bit too light. I described it to my wife as the 'People Magazine history of Alexandria.' The focus is on celebrities, money, murders and sensations. Not an entirely bad place to spark an interest in this subject.
The 196 pages are divided up into 33 chapters. Each chapter covers 2 or 3 celebrities of Alexandrian history. That allows the author only about a page per luminary, so it has to move pretty quickly. The first hundred years (330 to 230 BC) get 90 pages. The next 200 get only 40 (230 BC to 30 AD). After that, there is little on the library itself, only the Alexandrian fin-de-siecle told as soap opera.
Of course, Flower's 'decline' story (30 to 642 AD) is the subject of some debate. Flower's write that the Caliph Umar used the following logic to justify burning the library's books: "If what is written in them agrees with the Book of God, they are not required; if it disagrees, they are not desired. Destroy them therefore,". The modern 'Bibliotheca Alexandrina' website asserts the Christians destroyed the library 200 years before the Muslims got there.
For a deeper look, see
The Vanished Library: A Wonder of the Ancient World, Canfora
Pappus of Alexandria and the Mathematics of Late Antiquity, Cuomo
The Library of Alexandria: Centre of Learning in the Ancient World, Macleod
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Ancient History Lite, September 16, 2002
Pretty good scholarship and a breezy style mix uneasily in this treatment of a subject on which almost no reliable information exists.
33 chapters, foreword, and a preface by Mohsen Zahran, project manager for Bibliotheca Alexandrina.
Alexandria's library, founded early in the 3rd century B.C. by Ptolemy II, was almost as famous as its lighthouse (one of the Seven Wonders of the World), but its appearance, size, and even location are unknown. This book, inspired by the current project to create a huge modern library in Alexandria, traces what little is known of the ancient library, and follows with about 30 short chapters describing the careers of various ancient scholars associated in one way or another with it. It reads as a kind of who's who of the late hellenistic and early Christian world.
Flower has a breezy, offhand style--reminiscent of James Burke in his "Connections" column for Scientific American (but without the connections). This can obscure the quality of his research, which seems to be, over all, quite good, if at times cut short as he speeds through the material. I say "seems" because it's not easy to be sure of Flower's authority, for, although there are many footnotes, they are generally used to make parenthetical comments rather than to note sources. There are certainly some errors. For example, in Caesar's Alexandrian war, Flower describes the eunuch Pothinus as "the Egyptian Prime Minister Ponthius".
For the short, light work it is, there is a lot of information, and some good nuggets. For example, despite a lifelong study of astrology, I didn't know that it was a geometer named Hypsicle and his book "On Ascensions" that provided the means for calculating time and degree of a zodiacal sign's rise on the ecliptic. There are quite a few of these tidbits strewn through the text.
This book provides some choice bits of information in a loose, cataloglike structure whose authority is not clear--rather like, say, a tourist brochure. I wouldn't want to rely on it as a source. However, if you're really interested in the library of Alexandria, then you should probably read it--there aren't a lot of other sources out there.
The book appears to be published through Xlibris, a self-publication "strategic partner" of Random House.
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