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Aladdin's Lamp: How Greek Science Came To Europe Through The Islamic World (2009)

by John Freely(Favorite Author)

3.57 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

030726534X (ISBN13: 9780307265340)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Knopf

review 1: The first third of this book told how the Arabs and other mid-eastern people translated, preserved and expanded Greek Scientific texts. Most of the rest of the book is an encyclopeidic compilation of the achievements of rennaisance science, a little odry and formulaic. The last chapter tell of the further achievements of the Turks and Arabs in the past five hundred years. Perhaps reading another book on medieval arab science would be more helpful if this is your interest.
review 2: A basic book of history will give the reader dates, places and names to memorize; a great book of history will show the reader the historical current that underlie the dates, places and names, to the point of making them secondary. Although Freely’s work showed hints of greatne... moress, specially towards the end, it was nevertheless incapable of making the complete leap. He seems so obsessed with giving credit to all those who contributed to the beginnings of science that he ends up dedicating hardly more than a paragraph to most of them. This result in the reader getting a catalog of names and works without much analysis to understand more than who did what first. Freely treats the take up by Islamic science in the same way, giving names of who translated what work without going into why is it that Islam found a love for science and how they lost it. By far the greatest parts of the book are those that deal, quite thoroughly, with Copernicus and Newton, who, though certainly impacted by the Arab contributions to science, are far enough removed from them for the reader to wonder why that level of detail was not applied to the scientists who benefited the most from the Islamic contributions. Overall, this book fell flat from the promises of explaining, rather than just cataloging, the vital role that Islamic science had in ushering the scientific revolution. less

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