Ed

interesting but....

Revisado: 03-19-14

The book tells a very interesting history of Alexandria. The range of subjects covered as well as the time period spanned makes it good for someone looking for an introduction into to the Hellenistic world. Unfortunately, the descriptions given of many episodes in the history of science are somewhat reductive. For example, the authors speak of the world's first "university" in Alexandria. There was no such thing. Universities are institution with medieval origins, and saying that there was a university in ancient world is a simplification of what a university is, and what was going on in Alexandria. There are many similar examples where the authors project episodes and events into a modern context and thereby simplify many of the complexities of history. For example, the steam engine as developed in 18th century Europe was a very different machine that what Hero invented, and reducing it to a single element to find the commonality between collapses the intervening innovations into a triviality. The worst example of this, to finish off, is the authors' use of the word "science" in an unproblematic way to describe activities in the ancient world. Using the word gives the impression that these activities separated by 2000 years are somehow the same, when in fact there are many differences between the two. Explaining what these differences are would have served the listeners better than to constantly talk about "science" in the ancient world. "Philosophy" would have been a much better word to use. Finally, there are sometime serious errors of fact. The most glaring is the authors' claim that people thought the earth was flat from after antiquity to the time of Columbus. This is simply not true, and basic fact checking would have caught such massive errors.

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esto le resultó útil a 1 persona

interesting

Revisado: 10-01-12

The book is well written, and the audio production is great from all points of view.

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