Reviews for The Story of the Church of Egypt: Being an Outline of the History of the Egyptians Under The...

The average rating for The Story of the Church of Egypt: Being an Outline of the History of the Egyptians Under The... based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-05-21 00:00:00 Stephen Spooner While this isn't a page-turner, it wasn't a grind. There was a see-saw of "I knew this" and "Didn't know that" facts. I knew that Aristotle was Alexander's tutor. I didn't know that Demosthenes was a vociferous enemy of Philip of Macedon and of Alexander. Rank and file is a familiar phrase, but it wasn't until I read "The men were arranged in lines, one behind the other, and all facing the enemy — sixteen lines and a thousand in each line, or, as it is expressed in military phrase, a thousand in rank and sixteen in file." that I attached a picture of rows and columns to those words. I had assumed rank had to do with hierarchy. Occasionally Abbott takes an excursion which delights me: The desert has, in some degree, the sublimity of the ocean. There is the same boundless expanse, the same vast, unbroken curve of the horizon, the same tracklessness, the same solitude. There is, in addition, a certain profound and awful stillness and repose, which imparts to it a new element of impressiveness and grandeur. Its dread and solemn silence is far more imposing and sublime than the loudest thunders of the sea. Regarding Alexander? He was unable to survive his success due to the excesses of his lifestyle.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-01-09 00:00:00 Matthias Otto This was very interesting. I had no idea that Alexander was such an unpleasant person on top of being the conqueror of just about the whole known world. The only decent people, as far as I could tell, were the old general he had murdered on what appears to be an utterly ridiculous pretext, and Darius-king-of-Persia's mother. As I listened to the LibriVox version, I have no way of knowing if the book contained much in the way of references or notes, but I very much doubt the accuracy of some of the material. What is the likelihood that the dialogue mentioned was actually recorded (accurately or otherwise) and safely transmitted? I also found the tone a little patronising. There were, however, many interesting asides (such as the fact that the word 'meander' was originally the name of a river that did precisely that).