Reviews for Exploring History

The average rating for Exploring History based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-08-23 00:00:00 Robert Ricciardi Meant for middle-grade readers, but a good introduction to/overview of prehistory nonetheless. Emphasis is on the Ice Age, with a smattering about the various stone ages (Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic).

Review # 2 was written on 2016-12-11 00:00:00 Marvin Tahmahkera If you're looking for a summary of or guide to the Qur'an, this book probably isn't it. This concept of a biography of a book is not unique to this particular book, but it is somewhat new. It's been effectively applied to several historic books but perhaps nowhere more successfully than here. The Quran: a Biography, by Bruce Lawrence, is part of a series called Books That Shook the World which is being published currently by the Atlantic Monthly. The Book of Mormon: A Biography, on the other hand, is a part of Princeton University's Lives of Great Religious Books series. But I understand that Bruce Lawrence will be adding a title about the Quran to this series, as well. It will be interesting to see how it differs from his Books That Shook the World volume. I read the Qur'an biography right around the same time I read the Book of Mormon biography, and I have to say that the former is a much better book (but probably mostly just because the Book of Mormon hasn't had enough exposure to the world yet to match up to what Lawrence has covered here in terms of content). Both books are written on a similar model, that of tracking the influence of a specific book across history, noting both how the book changes influential people across the ages and also how the attention those same people give the book changes perceptions of the book and its role in various cultures through time. I particularly enjoyed the chapters on the Dome of the Rock and the Taj Mahal. I will definitely take a copy of this book along with me the next time I visit either of these monuments, particularly the latter one. It would serve as an excellent guide to the inscriptions on these buildings. Also interesting were the chapters about a couple of early Sunni and Shi'ite religious authorities who read the Quran and were molded by it but who also influenced future readers with their own unique assumptions and commentaries about the contents of it. Ja`afar As-Sadiq established the Shi`ite school of law known by his name (Ja`afar) while, in Sunni Islam, four major schools of law developed over time. The chapter on Robert of Ketton, the first person to translate the Quran into a Western language, i.e. Latin, provided fascinating insights into the mindset of Europeans and Christians in general during the 12th century. Among others, the book also covers a 19th century Pakistani poet and an Indian educator from the 1930s along with three personalities from the current era, including Osama Bin Laden, to me the least interesting chapter in the book. I don't think I really did the book justice with my first reading, so I'll plan at some future date to re-visit it so that I can focus on the chapters I only had time to quickly gloss over this time. This really is a spectacular work of scholarship, but one that's accessible to the layman. As such, I hope it won an award of some kind when it came out in 2006... Or several.