Book review: The Map of Knowledge

much was not lost…

 

 

Book review:

     The Map of Knowledge:

     A Thousand-Year History

     of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found

 

Violet Moller

New York: Doubleday, 2019

312 pages

 

It’s quite possible that Moller offers much more than you already know about Euclid’s The Elements (c300 BCE). and Ptolemy’s The Almagest, (c150 CE), and the many published works on anatomy and medicine by Galen (130-210 CE).

The Map of Knowledge is a scholarly account of the preservation of knowledge from ancient times to the present day. You can guess that it’s not a beach book.

Moller forgot to mention that throughout the centuries, most human beings on the planet couldn’t read or write, and so it was the lucky, the gifted, and the self-selected few who preserved important knowledge for the benefit of succeeding generations. Think about a version of Fahrenheit 451, stretched over the centuries.

Go ahead, read Fahrenheit 451 again.

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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2019 All rights reserved.

 

Book review: Tales from Shakespeare

summaries by Charles and Mary Lamb…

click here

My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 53 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”

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