The True Description of Cairo: A Sixteenth-Century Venetian View (Studies in the Arcadian Library) 3 Volume Set

Book Description

In 1549 a Venetian print maker, Matteo Pagano, published a large woodblock print of an aerial view of the city of Cairo; it was accompanied by a Latin text ('Descriptio Alcahirae') attributed to the orientalist scholar, Guillaume Postel. The depiction of the city is sufficiently accurate to permit a detailed interpretation of the city to be made, and it remained the standard western representation of this fabled eastern city for the next 250 years. Nicholas Warner provides a context for Pagano's view of Cairo, a translation of Postel's text, and a commentary on the contents of the print itself in addition to the accompanying narrative. An index of subsequent revisions, and a superbly produced enhanced facsimile of the view itself is included. Volume 1 (208 pages) includes 36 large colour plates, 5 black-and-white plates, and a modern facsimile of the original Latin text 'Descriptio Alchiriae' Volume 2 (208 pages) includes a modern facsimile of the original Latin text 'Descripto Alcahirae', and 68 black-and-white images, all details of the view Volume 3 - the view of Cairo - is a 'modern facsimile' of the original view i.e. with blemishes etc removed, packed in a slip case. It is the same size as the original, and folds out in a similr manner to an ordnance survey map. Printed in two colours to match the original.

Asian Travel in the Renaissance (Renaissance Studies Special Issues)

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Asian Travel in the Renaissance (Renaissance Studies Special Issues)

Manufacturer: Blackwell Publishing Limited
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Asian Travel in the Renaissance looks at travel in Asia for the purposes of trade, colonialism, and religious conversion by a diverse array of Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, and English figures. It contrasts the traditions and aspirations of rival trading companies and religious orders in the Renaissance era, describing the cultural politics of European contact with countries from Siam to Japan.The book comprises a series of essays written by international scholars, each of which focuses on a particular aspect of religious, cultural, political, and economic exchange. Subjects under scrutiny include Dutch methods of globalisation, the Jesuits ' attempts to introduce European culture into China, the part played by the Far East in the English imagination, and the documentary resources available to chroniclers who recorded the journeys of their countrymen. Collectively, the essays establish the importance of Asia as a place of aspiration and experience in the early modern period.

Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 12501625 (Past and Present Publications)

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Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 12501625 (Past and Present Publications)
Joan-Pau Rubiés
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
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Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks
Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy, 1400-1600

ASIN: 0521526132

Book Description

This book is a major contribution to the study of the encounter between Europeans and non-Europeans in the early modern period and to a neglected aspect of the cultural transformation of Europe throughout the Renaissance. Focusing on European travelers in India and their analysis of Hindu society, politics and religion, it also offers a detailed and systematic study of the variety of travel narratives describing South India from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries. In addition, the book proposes a novel approach to the study of European attitudes toward non-Europeans.

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This book offers a wide-ranging and ambitious analysis of how European travellers in India developed their perceptions of ethnic, political and religious diversity over three hundred years. It analyses the growth of novel historical and philosophical concerns, from the early and rare examples of medieval travellers such as Marco Polo, through to the more sophisticated narratives of seventeenth-century observers - religious writers such as Jesuit missionaries, or independent antiquarians such as Pietro della Valle. The book's approach combines the detailed contextual analysis of individual narratives with an original long-term interpretation of the role of cross-cultural encounters in the European Renaissance. An extremely wide range of European sources is discussed, including the often neglected but extremely important Iberian and Italian sources. However, the book also discusses a number of non-European sources, Muslim and Hindu, thereby challenging simplistic interpretations of western 'orientalism'.

Asian Travel in the Renaissance.(Book review): An article from: Renaissance Quarterly

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Asian Travel in the Renaissance.(Book review): An article from: Renaissance Quarterly
James D. Ryan
Manufacturer: Thomson Gale
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This digital document is an article from Renaissance Quarterly, published by Thomson Gale on March 22, 2006. The length of the article is 796 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Asian Travel in the Renaissance.(Book review)
Author: James D. Ryan
Publication: Renaissance Quarterly (Magazine/Journal)
Date: March 22, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 59 Issue: 1 Page: 248(2)

Article Type: Book review

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Was Western civilization founded by ancient Egyptians and Phoenicians?
Can the ancient Egyptians usefully be called black?
Did the ancient Greeks borrow religion, science, and philosophy from the Egyptians and Phoenicians?
Have scholars ignored the Afroasiatic roots of Western civilization as a result of racism and anti-Semitism?

In this collection of twenty essays, leading scholars in a broad range of disciplines confront the claims made by Martin Bernal in Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. In that work, Bernal proposed a radical reinterpretation of the roots of classical civilization, contending that ancient Greek culture derived from Egypt and Phoenicia and that European scholars have been biased against the notion of Egyptian and Phoenician influence on Western civilization. The contributors to this volume argue that Bernal's claims are exaggerated and in many cases unjustified.

Topics covered include race and physical anthropology; the question of an Egyptian invasion of Greece; the origins of Greek language, philosophy, and science; and racism and anti-Semitism in classical scholarship. In the conclusion to the volume, the editors propose an entirely new scholarly framework for understanding the relationship between the cultures of the ancient Near East and Greece and the origins of Western civilization.

Customer Reviews:

Both sides are equally ignorant.......2007-07-18

Greek civilization was much influenced by Egyptian civilization, this cannot be doubted, especially if one refers to ancient texts. What is absurd about both accounts and the militants forging their views, is the notion that Egyptian civilization was black or that African=Black. In fact, the label African was first used to refer to Phoenicians, and would never have been used to refer to the Black sub-saharan peoples that were known as Zanj, Sudanese or Aethiopian. When black contributors claim that Egypt is in "Africa" and that Egyptians were "African" they forget that they were not part of that "Africa" and that they weren't known as "Africans", that is, until the desecration of the word, it's misuse and abuse. As it stands today, the term is a misnomer. It is sad and scary how blacks are attempting to pillage alien cultures (Egyptian for instance) out of an inability or unwillingness to acknowledge their own for what it is. It is equally sad that certain "scholars" are trying to downplay Egyptian contribution and indeed, supremacy, in the ancient world. The world is changing , and I'm afraid for the worse.

A most necessary read.......2007-05-31

I came to this issue as a teacher of ancient philosophy, and a concern to understand the claims of afrocentrists, as well as Bernal, that the ancient Greek philosophers took some significant portion of their thought from the Egyptians, in particular the Egyptian priests. What I have read of these claims has not been, in my view, impressive. (The best that Bernal can offer, given that no Egyptian texts bear any resemblance to Greek philosophy, is that the popular religion of Egypt "must" have been a popularized expression of some more abstract wisdom-an argument from ignorance of the most tendentious sort.) Still Bernal is the most impressive of those who argue for a massive cultural influence on the Greeks by the Egyptians, both from the perspective of the breadth of fields he marshals (though hardly masters) in support of the position, and the massive size of his output. For many who are not specialists these two features alone might seem to suggest that Bernal is correct. Thus the great value of this volume, which includes evaluations by various true specialists in the fields that Bernal attempts to harness for his own purposes: classical studies, linguistics, archeology, Egyptology, and history (Bernal, by the way, is a trained political scientist).

What is revealed is the various ways in which Bernal gets things wrong. He trusts in the historicity of myth in a simple-minded way that no current student of mythology would. He is uncritical of the writings of ancient authors who to some degree appear to support his case. He is highly selective of the evidence. For example, his treatment of nineteenth century classical studies points to authors who appeared to have racial motivations while ignoring others, such as Grote, who clearly did not.

One, to my mind, particularly revealing article is offered by Jay Jasanoff and Alan Nussbaum, trained linguists, where Bernal's linguistic evidence is evaluated. This might be one of the more important articles simply because comparative linguistics is such a technical and seemingly arcane discipline to the uninitiated (such as me), that Bernal's seeming mastery of it in support of the claim that some 25% of Greek words had Egyptian origins might be thought to be a particularly impressive component of the overall argument. What Jasanoff and Nussbaum discover, however, is that Bernal ignores the long established standards of evidence in these fields in favor of a quite superficial "looks alike" method for finding the massive linguistic influence on the Greeks. The authors meticulously go through a wide selection of Bernal's etymologies and debunk them all.

Perhaps the most unfortunate part of the book is a section of three articles on the subject of race: "unfortunate" because Bernal and other afrocentrists have reintroduced a scientifically worthless but historically invidious concept into academic discussions in their claim that the Egyptians were "blacks" (Bernal is a bit more timid here than other afrocentrists, simply saying that certain Egyptians could "usefully be thought of" as blacks). The authors of all three articles insist on rejecting this introduction of race into the issue. To my mind one of the most interesting articles was written by a team of anthropologists headed by C. Loring Brace. Brace brings scientific techniques to bear on the question, particularly comparative anatomy. The discussion reveals two things: 1. that indeed the concept of race has no basis in scientific fact, and has been replaced by the notions of "klines" (variations of anatomy selected by environmental conditions) and "clusters" (variations due simply to the locality of a reproductive population), and 2. that evidence Brace and his team developed shows that the ancient Egyptians cannot be considered (even "usefully") as either "blacks" or "whites" in the modern senses of those terms.

The contributions to this volume are uniformly erudite, well-argued, and well-informed by the latest understandings in the various fields represented. And this is a much needed book. There has been a disturbing propensity in academe as of late to inject politics into research of various forms. This has had the general character of first defining a view that is understood as somehow politically or socially beneficial or expedient from some perspective or another, and then searching for any sort of evidence or argument, however fanciful it might be, to support the view. At times these efforts are coupled by the postmodernist view that all so-called "knowledge" is historically contextualized and a product of social interests, so that any view is acceptable so long as it is embedded in a set of the "correct" political and social motivations. Although it is true that all seekers of truths are to some extent a product of their times, this extreme view has the most unfortunate effects. In the case of Bernal and afrocentrists a couple of such effects pointed out by the authors of this volume are first that their views, quite ironically, validate once again the concept of race, a concept so long used as the basis of oppression in this country, and second rather than eschewing eurocentrism it in fact reinvigorates it by the suggestion that the only way that the achievements of any culture can attain legitimate value and be worthy of study is if they can be shown to have influenced European culture. Given the tenuous threads of argument in afrocentrist writings that attempt to connect subSaharan African culture to the Greeks, threads that I believe are bound to snap if they haven't already, the consequent devaluation of African culture is the inevitable implication.

what is it about Black Athena Vol. 1 & 2 that has scared soo many?.......2007-05-29

Funny how 19th. C. Historical rethoric is not questioned. Think about it?
Most 19th. C historians where of Germanic and otherwise Aryan stock, slavery was still in full boogie business. The great Egyptian pyramids had been re discovered. How could a generation of slave owners make peace with the fact that the humans theybought and sold were African as were the very people who had founded the Egyptian dynasties? They could not.

Martin Bernal is a Jewish scholar who after over twenty five years of teaching Chinese history has a mid life crisis, "I do not understand my own people, the semitics." With that he launches into digging of the truth behind 19th c. scholarly writings. Dr. Bernal discoveres that not only were the semitics white washed(see his paper on Hannibal and the Cartheginians), so where the Egyptians, in a grand quest to PR the destruction of these two races, why? To support the outright contempt the Aryan Euros had against the Jews and the blacks, why? To maintain the status quo as the unquestioned authority of racial origins of civilization, which was believed to be white.

As a matter of fact, the oldest university in the world originates out of Africa, want to know from where email me or research it yourself.

So with these essays that support the 19th C. process of suppression I am one who urges you to read Martin Bernal's careful, and unbiased study of how these historical changes all came about--

Truth has power, but truth is only as powerful as those who wish to drink from the source.

A Brief History of the Rise and Fall of One Dimensional Whiteness.......2007-01-15

"In pursuing a PhD on Minoan archaeology, it became necessary to spend several years in Greece. Many of the scholars I encountered there were not only ignorant of the contributions of the Near East to the development of Greek civilization, they were uninterested." Dr. L. Hitchcock, Institute of Archaeology, UCLA

Classics and Education:
Education was once conceived almost exclusively as the cultivation of values and tastes that distinguished the learned from the lay, the culturally enlightened from the functionally literate. Today, however, we inhabit a flat world transformed both by expanding scientific horizons and by the agendas of new social and intellectual movements, from the critique of unfettered capitalism and the "universal" codes of the West to debates over endemic problems of class, sexism, racism, pollution, and homophobia.
Over the last twenty years, scholars influenced by these developments have clashed, as cultural historian Andrew Ross has observed, "with a reactionary consensus of left and right, each unswervingly loyal to their respective narratives of decline: charges of post-sixties fragmentation and academification from unreconstructed voices on the left, and warnings of doom and moral degeneracy from the Cassandras of the right."

Lefkowitz & Pseudohistory:
Pseudo history is purported history which often denies that there is such a thing as historical truth, clinging to the extreme skeptical notion that only what is absolutely certain can be called 'true' and nothing is absolutely certain, so nothing is true. Pseudo history includes Afro centrism, holocaust revisionism and the catastrophism, to them should be added Helleno-mania, centered in one-dimensional Whiteness. "Ancient Myths of Cultural Dependency," actually concerns a much broader topic: the way historians such as Herodotus, Diodorus, Strabo, Eudoxus and Aristobulus 'fabricated a myth' that the Greeks owed their culture to the Ancient Egyptians. Professor Lefkowitz, became involved in the debunking of Afrocentrism by discrediting Herodotus et al, and seemed upset, passionately shaken of her disregard as a scholarly authority, claiming her opponents and their supporters undermined her value, while they neglect to follow the conventional means of scholarly evidence. On a TV clip of Lefkowitz debating Afrocentrists, the moderator asks her, "And how many times have you been to Africa, Dr. Lefkowitz?" Replying that she has never been to Africa, the moderator commented conclusively, "I thought so."

Title change to Black Athena!
Black Athena: the pragmatic title of Bernal's best seller, suggests that the Greek goddess Athena, the central symbol of classical Greek civilization, had a tinted origin outside White Europe, in Black Africa. The question is not without consequences for philosophers of principal stake in the Black Athena debate, a claim concerning the non-European origins of the main philosophical tradition of Europe, if late antiquity Alexandria was excluded from the search of glorified ancestors. By one account, it was the publisher, in fact, who proposed the polarizing title, a proposal about which Professor Bernal was reported not to have been at all enthusiastic, probably realizing just how provocative such a title would be in the forefront of a work already full with more than enough of conflicting issues.

'Black Athena' & `White Egypt':
Ancient Egypt, although 'accidentally' situated on the NE edge of the African continent, was thought essentially by Egyptologists and Orientalists, led by JH Breasted, as a non-African civilization whose major achievements in the fields of religion, social, political and military organization, architecture and other crafts, the sciences etc., were largely original and whose historical engagement and its cultural interaction, and indebtedness lay, if any, with (South) West Asia rather than with sub-Saharan Africa. 'Black Athena' is a slogan just as false to history as is `White Egypt.' Egyptian wisdom was a only a part of the most enduring civilization to our day, is existentially moral and social, different, and immutable with individual speculative Greek philosophy, nevertheless, Platonism was amended and upgraded by late antiquity Egyptian Copts, as the second century infamous Plutinus, fouder of Neoplatonism, a thinker from upper Egypt, who taught in Rome. While Aristotalian science was garbled by another seventh century Coptic genius, John Philoponoi.
Dr. Louise Hitchcock, of UCLA, Institute of Archaeology, wrote, "Bernal is certainly passionate, but I don't think his attempt is amateurish as much as it is biased...He has moved away from this theory in the Archaeology Magazine video 'Who was Cleopatra?' stating that it isn't necessary to believe in colonization to admit massive near eastern / Egyptian influence in the formation of Greece. I show this video to all my ancient art classes as an exercise in critical thinking, and an exercise in "how evidence can be distorted, created, (and) interpreted out of context.' ... No where is the naturalism of the Amarna period mentioned nor is it mentioned that Athenian democracy lasted a very brief period and was limited to male Athenian citizens. Nor is the 2000 year time difference mentioned."

Any future for Afrocentrism?
Inevitably, and in a rather belittling manner, "Herodotus is paraded in the all too familiar manner as the `Father of Lies', whereas more recent reassessment of the amazing extent of objective historical fact in Herodotus is ignored. Henry Frankfort, who was one of the greatest Egyptologists and Assyriologists of his generation, and whose books still rate as lasting standard works among the specialists, is denounced as `outdated'. Frobenius, one of the greatest Africanists of his generation (early twentieth century) who has been the main single intellectual influence upon Afrocentrism, is depicted as of negligible intellectual capabilities, of damaging influence even on European Africanism, hardly taken seriously by the specialists, and an art thief to boot. Sergi, a highly original physical anthropologist of the early twentieth century, is filed by Howe as merely `long-forgotten and academically discredited'," concludes W. van Binsbergen.

Where are the Orientalists?
Bernal's strategy in his preface is to acknowledge numerous authority figures who have helped him. These are just two examples of many of the problems in both books. If Lefkowitz et al. were held up to the same scrutiny that Bernal is, a number of distortions and biases can be uncovered there as well.
"It is a supreme irony that the only chapter on the Near East in Lefkowitz et al.'s 500+ page book is only 10 pages long and written by a classicist, Sarah Morris, and not a Near Eastern scholar. Lefkowitz, like Bernal, has her own rhetorical strategies for establishing her authority such as beginning her preface with the story of the professor of literature in 19th century Dublin who is untrained to interpret archaeological evidence, the implication by analogy being that Bernal is also a coffee table archaeologist too inexperienced to function within another discipline." adds Dr. Hitchcock

Academic Scandal, Contributors withdrew?
It is no wonder that investigations into external influences, whether passionate like Martin's, or serious and legitimate like those of a few bold Classicists who have dared to learn about Oriental cultures, resulting in their planned chapters were excluded from Lefkowitz & Rogers' *Black Athena Revisited*, after they were submitted, such incidents, are met with hesitancy or skepticism in some quarters.
As stated on owner-ane@ane-digest, two originally planned contributors to Lefkowitz volume withdrew when they heard that she denied Bernal the opportunity to respond in 'BA Revisited'. A contribution of Eric Cline (expert in Bronze Age relations between Egypt and the Aegean) was refused, with the argument there was no room, but Cline believes that resulted because his piece was favourable towards Bernal. Cline later published a damning review of 'BA Revisited' in Journal of Archaeology. Whether his paper was published elsewhere is not stated. Bernal does list over a dozen "general sympathetic" reviews of BA by specialists in several fields, as well as some hostile reviews of 'BA Revisited'.
"With that as the background noise of the uneducated masses in Greece (akin to the racist background noise in the US, which we like to think has been largely overcome but regularly finds expression, sometimes brutally, it is no wonder that investigations into external influences are met with hesitancy or skepticism in some quarters," concludes Peter Daniels

Is there a positive side?
Yes, affirms Christopher Robbins, "to my view,...Somewhere along the line the idea arose that the unprecedented Greek accomplishment was of a wholly endogenous provenance. This is an absurd idea when one thinks of a post-palatial-economies people emerging from a centuries-long dark age of villatic illiteracy into the archaic period.
Where was the raw material for the 6th c. and the classical going to come from is not largely from elsewhere? In fact this idea is an insult to one of the most fundamental aspects of what we may call the genius of the Greeks - or of the West ever since, for that matter.
After all, for the Greeks, for the West or for any manufacturing company in the world, it is not the raw materials (Advanced Egyptian civilization) that make a difference. Raw materials are available to anybody. The only difference is what is produced from those raw materials, whatever their source.
A basic common sense comment: Greek Classics, 700 BC lags two millennia beyond the Egyptian miracle, Pyramids built 2800 BC. Forget the petrified classics, What do you conclude?

Afrocentrists, and their critics, the People Without History ! .......2007-01-14

"Since the question of Egyptian origins is a topic in which considerable emotional capital has been invested, attempts simply to discuss the issues can easily be misunderstood as a form of hostility, so that even what was intended as praise is interpreted as blame." M. Lefkowitz

Classics & Civilization:
Do we study ancient cultures because, to some extent, all cultures share certain aspects? Does our Western culture reflect aspects of these other cultures? The answer to the first of the two questions has historically been found in a discussion of universality. The problem with the second question lies in its formulation. What is a culture after all?
Classics, a seemingly outdated domain, is defined, by Wikipedia as the study of the language, literature, history, and art of the ancient world, around the Mediterranean; especially of Greece and Rome during classical antiquity. Classics; a plural noun refers generally to texts of the ancient Mediterranean, whose study constituted the main body of the humanities and still of importance in that domain of learning today.

The case against Bernal:
In 'The case against Martin Bernal,' David Gress, a Danish who has further identified the campus debates as a target, with an attack on Afrocentrism, alleging that, "the political purpose of Black Athena is, of course, to lessen European cultural arrogance." Apart from the fact that this charge has become a straw man--the chief problem in the academy today isn't European cultural arrogance but its opposite-- Bernal's account, and the political circumstances in which it appears, raise some important questions about scholarship and propaganda in the academy and, a fortiori, in what remains of the general culture."

Ms Lefkowitz knows better:
Mary Lefkowitz, who received her Ph.D. in Classical Philology at Radcliffe College almost half a century ago (46 years) struggled to explain, "...why some popular modern mythologies of the ancient world appear to have been created, and why they are mythologies rather than history. Also I ... attempt to show why it was that ancient writers like Herodotus and Diodorus claimed (mistakenly) that some aspects of Greek culture derived from Egypt, whereas such evidence as we have, suggests that the customs they regard as Egyptian in origin were either indigenous, or derived from other sources;..." she attacked the established belief in an Egyptian Mystery System, institutions or initiation ritual, which could have inspired similar Greek traditions, the ultimate source of its thought systems; Greek philosophy.

Black Athena Revisited:
A collection of twenty essays in scholarly response to Bernal's first two volumes of Black Athena, a testament to the impact of Bernal's multi colored coat of scholarship, that so many contributors have combined their expertise to review the work of scholarship of the ancient Mediterranean world. Some were already published as book reviews; while the rest were written for this united front against Afrocentrism. Introduced by Mary Lefkowitz and concluded by Guy Rogers, the eighteen papers in between were written by American, English and an Italian expert, in Egyptology, Racism, with Orientalists, Linguistics, a science historian, Hellenists, and Historiographers. This wide front of contributors to 'Black Athena Revisited,' from a diverse range of related academic fields are united to confront the admirable Bernal trying to discredit his talented interpretation of any dark, let alone a Black Athena. Black Athena Revisited is a stimulating collective response, offering a variety of critical essays by experts from a diversity of disciplines covering Bernal's main hypotheses. Although mostly all papers extend attacks on Bernal and while rejecting his methodology, vary in tone from a polemical to critical, a couple come across as almost approaching character assassination.
Toby Wilkinson, of Christ's College, Cambridge wrote, "..no other book on the ancient world has created as much of a storm as Martin Bernal's Black Athena. Since the publication of the first volume in 1987, nearly seventy reviews, articles and films have appeared discussing the book, its goals, methods and hypotheses. Responses to Bernal's second volume, published 1991, have added to the enormous literature surrounding the work."

Baines Contra Bernal:
John Baines offers an Egyptologist criticism of Bernal's thesis and methodology in his paper, 'On the Aims and Methods of Black Athena,' expressing serious reservations on the limited use of the Egyptological evidence in support of Egypt's contribution to the development of Greek civilization. He states his criticism that, 'Bernal's reluctance to engage with ancient Near Eastern civilizations on their own terms leads to bizarre interpretations.' Another Egyptologist, David O'Connor, no less critical in Bernal's conclusions, debates in a more conciliatory tone. 'Egypt and Greece: The Bronze Age Evidence' targets the textual evidence for Egypt's relations with the Levant during its Middle and New Kingdoms.
In 'Black Athena: An Egyptological Review,' Yurco provides a rather detailed evaluation of the Egyptian evidence, downplaying the role of Mesopotamian influences in the formation of Greek civilization, in accordance with recent Egyptological consensus. The Meet Rahina inscription 'does attest an Egyptian-ruled Asiatic empire' contradicts O'Connor interpretation and accepts more of Bernal's arguments, for Egyptian influence on the Greeks as 'in essence reasonable.'

Experts' Opinions:
"Howe, an 'anti-Afrocentrist' by his own definition, is not taken with Lefkowitz's work. The distances which separate him from Lefkowitz, however, are minimized by the historiographic and epistemological issues the two embrace. Both are concerned with who has the right?, who is privileged, to participate in the construction of both history and knowledge?" If this seems to be an argument only supported by classicists, Afrocentrists, and their critics, the questions involved in the privileging of certain histories and constructions of knowledge should resonate for world historians when they consider Eric Wolf's title and its implications: Europe and the People Without History.

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Black Athena revisited.
Mary R., and Rogers, Guy MacLean, eds. Lefkowitz
Manufacturer: Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, [
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ASIN: B000OUV86Q

The God Hypothesis: Discovering Design in Our Just Right Goldilocks Universe
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Evolution is Anti-knowlege - Self Organization is non causual reasoning - Big Bang, a mathematic singularity

Oops. (Reckless, but slightly better than 2 stars)

Just make sure you read "The God Delusion" as well

Masterpiece

Convincing, satisfying & complete

The God Hypothesis: Discovering Design in Our Just Right Goldilocks Universe
Michael Corey
Manufacturer: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
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Book Description

The God Hypothesis seeks to reverse the profound misunderstanding that science has disproved the existence of God. Drawing on the fairy tale of Goldilocks and The Three Bears, Michael A. Corey believes that the just right conditions that created life on earth provide overwhelming evidence of an Intelligent Designer at work.

Customer Reviews:

Evolution is Anti-knowlege - Self Organization is non causual reasoning - Big Bang, a mathematic singularity.......2007-08-28

1. Collin Patterson said, "Last year I had a sudden realization. For over twenty years I had thought I was working on evolution in some way. One morning I woke up and something had happened in the night; and it struck me that I had be working on this stuff for twenty years and there was not one thing that I knew about it. That's quite a shock to learn that one can be so misled so long...Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing... that is true? All I got was silence." The doctrine of evolution is anti-knowledge meaning it does not convey knowledge. Evolution is a false faith endorsed by academia and sponsored by strong political and economic pressure to accept. Evolution does not create beauty, harmony, nor cooperative systems and at best natural selection yields unstable, chaotic, and competitive networks. The idea of gradual change over billions of years producing a tree of life can not be proven. Evolution proof is impossible because it has no reversible pattern or algorithm. Evolution is the product of "Self-sufficient" thinkers who ignore any role that God had in the creation. Evolution is the ultimate excuse to ignore God. Preachers of evolution argue, "our behavioral freedom would necessarily be short-circuited by our direct perception of God's Great glory, and this something that is generally deemed to be incompatible with our existence as free-will beings." We are agents of a Divine God and God's creations are designed for beauty and the benefit of man. "The whole idea here is to infuse some much needed ambiguity into the creation, so that human freedom can be preserved as a result." The universe is far more surprising that any one could ever image. God is central and important part of explaining cosmological and biological theories.
2. "We also know that the finite property of self-organization couldn't possibly have been responsible for its own origin, because there was a definite point in the past before it ever existed." Self-organization would need a reason or explaining power for existence, causal or otherwise, other than itself. The only way out of the bind is to suggest that self-organization is "eternal in nature". The phenomenon of self-organization is not eternal in nature.
3. Fundamental laws and constants of nature do not gradually evolve into their present life-supporting character. Natural selection and Darwinism fail.
4. "Where did the universe get this seemingly self-sufficient character to begin with?" Jesus Christ is the power by which the Universe is powered and remains in order. Accepting this fact brings certainty and faith in the purpose of man. We don't need to fear cosmological destruction by random events.
5. The Universe is expanding or inflating, at approximately 4 millions per hour. The Universe is not expanding at a constant rate suggested by Einstein's cosmological constant. Einstein called the cosmological constant a mistake. Einstein believed in "Spinoza God," and impersonal Deity who only revealed himself in the orderly workings of nature. "In Einstein's mind, such an impersonal Creator could conceivable have allow these worldly evils to happen, either because he wouldn't have known about them, or else because he wouldn't have cared about them." Einstein was reluctant to accept the big bang bringing him to the acceptance of a personal creator. The second law of thermodynamics says that the total amount of disorder in the universe can never decrease. A winding down suggest their must have been a winding up. George Gamow big bang calculations predicted 25 percent of the matter in the universe will be helium and the other 75 percent, hydrogen. Penrose and Hawkings proof of the big bang was found in the peculiar properties of black holes. "Sufficiently dense stars that exceeds the Chandrasekhar limit, the inward pull of gravity will eventually be able to overwhelm the outward push by the Pauli Exclusion Principle (force to accelerating a particle to the speed of light), with the result that the star will begin a calamitous period of runaway contraction." The singularity is a state of zero size and infinity density.
6. The amount of matter produced by the big bang is exact. Any more matter and gravitational contraction would occur and not enough and galaxies would not form. The cosmic initial conditions are very fine tuned to support life. A veil of mystery will always prevent science from understanding the initial condition. At 10 minus 43 power seconds, Planks Wall is the temperature point where temperatures are so high that the four fundamental forces of physics dissolve. Limitations include limits to human intellect, measuring apparatus, and the intrinsic uncertainty of quantum reality.
7. The notion of oscillating universes that move back and forth between contraction and expansion are not feasible. The universe is expanding with not force strong enough to cause contraction, the universe will not collapse because there isn't enough matter to cause the collapse. Each cycle of expansion and contraction in an oscillating universe must produce an increase in cosmic disorder, or entropy. The increase in entropy would reveal itself in an increase of photons and nuclear particles. The universe does not seem to be the product of an infinite number of cycles. There is no known physical mechanism that is capable of reversing a cosmic contraction.

Oops. (Reckless, but slightly better than 2 stars).......2007-06-27

At about the same time I received this book, I read a similarly titled book whose thesis is the exact counter-argument to Corey's; that volume being "God: the Failed Hypothesis," by Victor Stenger. Both books are --intensely-- flawed. Stenger presents an easily rebutted collection of arguments that he claims to be 'science' putting God to the gallows once and for all. By his own modest admission, Stenger's interpretations of certain physical theories depart substantially from the understandings of most physicists, and many of Stenger's offbeat "interpretations" are simply silly. Unfortunately, the present volume, "The God Hypothesis," by Michael Corey, is argued almost as badly.

Corey does present enough 'expert testimony' to make the case that "our 'just right' goldilocks universe" is outrageously unlikely, impossible by any reasonable standard, unless it has been intended by a Super-intellect having some conceptual 'likeness' to Anaxagoras' 'primordial Mind' and Aristotle's 'First Mover'. Support is cited from the recent work of many well-known physicists: Gribben, Davies, Hawking, Penrose, Rees, Barrow, Gingerich, Dyson, Jastrow, Smoot, and many more, as well as many biologists. If Corey had been a great deal more cautious in his interpretations and comments regarding the citations he makes, the book could have been both shorter and more powerfully argued. But when Corey throws his own 'scientific' understandings into the mix, he often succeeds only in muddling the topic at hand. Corey's defective spin on physical theory will have informed readers (perhaps especially those who might otherwise be inclined to agree with his thesis) gritting their teeth and wincing. Some examples of Corey's poor understanding of physics:

1) He says that the "flatness" of the universe refers to the fact that it can be accurately described with Euclidean geometry, that space-time is fortuitously not curved, and that life can only exist in a universe consistent with Euclidean geometry. Ouch! There is just no salvaging this kind of tangential blunder.

2) He says that most stars are like ours because they are "main sequence" stars. This seems to demonstrate a poor understanding. The main sequence is the long, 'star-like' phase typical of several classes of stars. Our star (the sun) is actually UNLIKE the vast majority of stars; as a Class G star, only about 8% of other stars are 'similar'. By far most stars are Class M and are decidedly different from our sun (they cannot have systems that host life as we know it).

3) He calls 10 to the negative 39th power a "huge number." Perhaps he means "huge" as in its largeness of extreme smallness??

At any rate, Corey too frequently 'shoots himself in the foot' with erroneous 'scientific' commentary. His book could have been much better if he could have stayed out of his own way. The book's slightly redeeming value is that the scientifically uniformed reader will not notice the author's interpretational gaffes (which are generally tangential and superfluous to his central thesis). The book is also a pretty good bibliographical source for more serious study. In short, the book's potential merits are conspicuously sullied by its author's careless commentary.

Just make sure you read "The God Delusion" as well.......2006-11-15

Every single one of Corey's points is debunked in Dawkins' book.

Of course, if you find the placebo effect of believing in a Supreme Being provides you comfort, and truth is relatively unimportant, avoid Dawkins' book and believe what you want to believe.

Masterpiece.......2005-02-15

This book is about as near as Christianity can get to an additional sacred revelation. In its pages Corey gives an immensly intimate look at God in His artistic facet as Creator of the universe. Upon completing the book, I was both mentally and spiritually satiated, and felt as if I had actually been shown the glorious blueprints of the universe as once abstracted in the mind of God. The details of Gods creative plan are so vividly depicted that reading the book is practically analogous to viewing a collection of art work painted by Christ Himself! This book is destined for immortality, and will be remembered in a thousand years from now as the most awe-inspiring scientific work of humankind.

Convincing, satisfying & complete.......2004-09-14

Why 5 Stars? From all the books that I've read on Intelligent Design, this is by far the most complete & satisfying. Reading through the book one must appreciate the thorough research done by Mr Corey, based on which he forms a convincing case for 'The God Hypothesis'.

Using the latest empirical data Corey shows how our universe was 'fine-tuned' at the big-bang without which life would have been impossible, simultaneously shows why counter theories against multiple universes and big-bangs are not plausible. Here are a few specific points on why I recommend this book:

- It's easy to read. As a business student I thought I would be struggling through the book, but that was not the case. Corey has a gift of expressing his thoughts in a clear style. I found the book to be readable and throught-provoking.

- Often books on this subject only deal with the evidence that point to a God, talking little or nothing about the kind of God the evidence shows. But Corey has taken the extra step to discuss the various attributes of God that can be inferred from the available evidence.

- His arguments are not camouflaged in paragraphs for the reader to look out for, but he presents it logically in syllogistic style with no loose ends.

- He gives wonderful insights from a wide variety of people coming from different backgrounds. From scientists like Hawking & Hoyle to philosophers like Kant & Hick.

- Corey presents several counter-arguments against those who have objections to an Intelligent designer. He deals with Richard Dawkins' Blind Watchmaker to Lee Smolin's Baby universes and many others. The author very clearly shows that the Blind Watchmaker, using mindless chance & natural selection alone, cannot explain the design & specified complexity in the universe because it ultimately begs the question since Natural Selection itself contains properties that such as self-replicating that are highly complex & therefore cannot just be assumed for the pupose of removing the role of an Intelligent Designer.

- Some of the other questions that skeptics ask are answered by Corey:
a) If God created this universe for mankind, why didn't he create it in an instantaneous fiat, instead of billions of years of evolution?
b) Why is the fine-tuning not a another God of the Gaps problem?
c) Why is it not reasonable to attribute the fine-tuning to an accident or coincidence?
d) Why does God choose to present himself indirectly through natural causes?

I highly recommend this book to those have doubts in their mind about the relationship between God & Science but don't know where to start or those who would like a fresh insight into the latest scientific evidence that point to a Creator. This book is also great for the believers who wish to learn how to present the argument for God in a scientific fashion.

In the library of Intelligent Design Books, "The God Hypothesis" will remain a star for times to come.

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Parks & Recreation, published by National Recreation and Park Association on May 1, 2003. The length of the article is 5193 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Where the money goes: how recent UPARR grant recipients have improved urban recreation opportunities. (History: UPARR at 25).(Urban Park and Recreation Recovery Program)
Publication: Parks & Recreation (Magazine/Journal)
Date: May 1, 2003
Publisher: National Recreation and Park Association
Volume: 38 Issue: 5 Page: 57(7)

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