Customer Reviews

The Shores of Wisdom: The Story of the Ancient Library of Alexandria

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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

The book certainly covers a fascinating subject but really does not do it much justice. The new library project is interjected in a rather annoying way. The history of the timeline is summarized fairly well but many of the details are not footnoted and more than once of dubious scholarly merit. It's a decent read to get familiar with the subject but not as entertaining nor as accurate as it could be.

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.

This text reads like a loose collection of notes, not like a book. Nearly every page contains multiple footnotes, some of which take up more space on the page than the actual text. This greatly interferes with the flow when reading. If that information is truly that relevant to the text, then it should have been written into the text. Run-on sentences and poor grammar and editing further impede reading. It seems like an incomplete work.

Some parts of this book seem to be a thinly veiled advertisement for the new Bibliotheca Alexandrina, which is of questionable merit: several decades and hundreds of millions of dollars for a grandiose building housing a mediocre library. This book leaves out those details, presenting an obviously biased view that calls into question the author's motivation as well as the remaining content.

With apologies to the author, I cannot recommend this book.

Derek Flowers book, The Shores of Wisdom, tells of the ancient Library of Alexandria, its history, its demise due to fire and of the ancient philosophers, astronomers and mathematicians associated with it. . It is worthy of note that the book is written in a flowing style, presenting a brief personal history of each of the characters associated with the Library and their professional, social and political relationship to each other. Personally, I found the book to be of extreme interest because I learned more about the contributions made by the ancient mathematicians whose theorems I have used in my engineering classes. One chapter describes the design of the new and outstanding Bibliotheca Alexandria, which is scheduled to be inaugurated in April, 2002.

I have just finished Derek Flower's book which I thoroughly enjoyed - it is easy to read, full of information about the Ancient Library of Alexandria and one of the few books to be so clear on the story of the lost library. An instructive and entertaining approach to this subject.

The opening of the huge new library in Alexandria, the Biblioteca Alexandrina, has revived worldwide interest in its predecessor, the first major library, which exerted tremendous influence on the development of western thought and culture beginning over 2300 years ago. The Shores of Wisdom is a concise, highly readable history of the ancient library, and of the scholars, scientists, and philosophers who helped to build upon and disseminate human knowledge. This is a well-researched book, made available at the right time, to put into perspective why the new library, within a stone's throw of the old one, is cause for celebration by literate people everywhere.

A book on a truly fascinating topic, plagued by sloppy copy editing and proof reading, and enough errors to make it annoying to any reader who knows how to use grammer, grommar, or whatever they call that. How disappointing!

I have just finished Derek Flower's book which I thoroughly enjoyed - it is easy to read, full of information about the Ancient Library of Alexandria and one of the few books to be so clear on the story of the lost library. An instructive and entertaining approach to this subject.