I bought this book new in 2005, then misplaced it. I rediscovered it while downsizing and finally read it. I regret having not read it twenty years ago, but I'm also pleased to have done so now, in a time when I can better appreciate it. It's all about Roget Bacon, a scholar who lived 800 years ago. The Dark Ages had been bumbling along for seven centuries by then, but the wonders of the Renaissance were still in the future. Bacon was a naturalist and a scientist by nature, but he was also keenly aware of the dangers attending by even the appearance of heresy in the 13th century. He wrote his observations down in a marvelous illuminated manuscript, which defied decipherment until the 20th century. The Lawrences tell the story of this extraordinary harbinger of the rediscovery of Greek science in a most engaging way. It is s story that threads its way through modern history since the 1912 rediscovery of what has been called the Voynich Manuscript. This is wonderful history.
A compulsively readable account of the most mysterious manuscript in the world, one that has stumped the world's greatest scholars and codebreakers.
The Voynich Manuscript, a mysterious tome discovered in 1912 by the English book dealer Wilfrid Michael Voynich, has puzzled scholars for a century. A small six inches by nine inches, but over two hundred pages long, with odd illustrations of plants, astrological diagrams, and naked women, it is written in so indecipherable a language and contains so complicated a code that mathematicians, book collectors, linguists, and historians alike have yet to solve the mysteries contained within. However, in…
My copy is a first edition (1961). It was the main text for my history course on World War II at the University of Minnesota 64 years ago. The history of World War II was taught by Prof. Harold Charles Deutsch (1904-1995), who had been a translator at Nuremberg and who astonished us with recitations of conversations with most of the captured senior Nazis. Deutsch was Chief of the Political Subdivision for Europe, Africa, and the Middle East for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. This was the predecessor to the CIA. Imagine reading what Shirer wrote about Hermann Goering on page 557, then going to class to hear your professor correct Shirer, say "when I interviewed Goering, he told me..." I'm an aging professor myself now, but back then I was a kid from a small Minnesota town called "Sleepy Eye," discovering the modern world via mentors like Deutsch. Books like this are classics for a reason.
It was Hitler's boast that the Third Reich would last a thousand years. Instead it lasted only twelve. But into its short life was packed the most cataclysmic series of events that Western civilisation has ever known.
William Shirer is one of the very few historians to have gained full access to the secret German archives which the Allies captured intact. He was also present at the Nuremberg trials.
First published sixty years ago, Shirer's account of the years 1933-45, when the Nazis, under the rule of their despotic leader Adolf Hitler, ruled Germany is held up as a classic…
Between the Greeks and the Renaissance lie the Dark Ages, so called for the pall of orthodoxy and repression that afflicted civilization for those lamentable centuries. But what was lost was found again, and modern science has been the marvelous result. Those of us alive and well today have much to be grateful for, and Violet Moller tells us how we came to inherit it all.
'A lovely debut from a gifted young author. Violet Moller brings to life the ways in which knowledge reached us from antiquity to the present day in a book that is as delightful as it is readable.' Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads
In The Map of Knowledge Violet Moller traces the journey taken by the ideas of three of the greatest scientists of antiquity - Euclid, Galen and Ptolemy - through seven cities and over a thousand years. In it, we follow them from sixth-century Alexandria to ninth-century Baghdad, from Muslim Cordoba to Catholic Toledo, from Salerno's medieval…
My book, The Extraordinary Journey of David Ingram is about a sixteenth-century sailor who was marooned with a hundred others on the Gulf Coast of Mexico. He and two shipmates were the only three who made it back to England. They did it by walking from Tampico to Florida, thence to New Brunswick, Canada, where they were rescued by a French ship in the Bay of Fundy. A dozen years later, when the English finally got interested in colonizing North America, Ingram was the only Englishman who could describe the interior of the country and its inhabitants to the men in the court of Elizabeth I. Ingram's testimony was recorded, but later so garbled by his editor that historians have discounted him as a source for the last four centuries. My research on the original manuscripts revealed that Ingram was not a liar, and that his account gave men like Francis Walsingham and Walter Ralegh what they were looking for, and much more. I am delighted to have been able to set the record straight.
