November 20, 2023
Historian Issa (Shakespeare and Terrorism) delivers a lively chronicle of one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities from its beginnings almost two and a half millennia ago to the present. Founded by Alexander the Great on the Mediterranean coast of present-day Egypt at the western edge of the Nile River delta, Alexandria started as a fishing village and became a place where “East and West could meet.” Issa highlights the Ptolemaic rulers who succeeded Alexander and turned the city into the Hellenistic capital with palaces and temples; the Pharos Lighthouse, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world; and the city’s Great Library and the Alexandrian Museum, which attracted scholars from around the world. Among other accomplishments, these scholars “developed geometry... proved the earth isn’t flat... invented the steam engine,” and collated and emended classical texts from many traditions, including Hindu, Jewish, and Zoroastrian. Julius Caesar’s siege in 47 BCE and Octavian’s showdown against Mark Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Alexandria in 30 BCE brought the city under Roman rule, until the Arab Rashidun Caliphate captured it in 642 CE. Issa vividly recounts subsequent invasions by the Crusaders, Ottomans, French, and British, and shows how in the modern era Alexandria continued in its role as a cultural hub and social and religious melting pot. This impressively researched account reveals a captivating city through the ages.
October 1, 2023
A comprehensive history of a city that has served as a "representative illustration of some of history's most consequential empires." An Alexandrian by birth, Issa, a curator, broadcaster, and professor of literature and history, relates his native city's past principally through attention to its most famous figures and rulers. Alexandria may carry the name of an extraordinary world-historical military genius, but many other celebrated figures--Homer's Helen of Troy and Paris, Aristotle (Alexander's teacher), Cleopatra and Antony, and the Ptolemy dynasty--have been associated with it over the centuries. Gamal Abdel-Nasser, Egypt's founding strongman, was born there; writers C.P. Cavafy, Anatole France, and Lawrence Durrell evoked it in their work; and composers like Sayed Darwish, known as "the father of Egyptian music," called it home. Alexandria's famous library housed the world's first great collection of knowledge, and its lighthouse was considered one of the Seven Wonders of the World. As a Mediterranean seaport on the western edge of the Nile Delta, Alexandria's grain trade sustained other significant cities like Athens, Rome, and Carthage. As Issa emphasizes in his brisk tale, the city's founders successfully "gambled on two outrageous hypotheses: that gathering a diverse set of people to live and work together would make the strategically located spot a world trading centre; and that collecting and generating knowledge would render it a global power." Thus, from its earliest days, Alexandria, whose history embodies most of the history of Mediterranean civilization, prefigured later, modern communities in its diverse, polyglot population of pagans, Christians, Jews, and Muslims. It remained vital even as it fell to successive conquests by Rome, Arab dynasties, the Ottomans, French, and British, before Egypt gained its independence in 1953 and Alexandria became the Arab city it is now. A well-researched, readable history of one of the world's oldest and most consequential cities.
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Starred review from November 1, 2023
Alexandria, the eponymous namesake of history's most vainglorious warrior king, has been Egyptian and Greek; Jewish, Muslim and Christian; conquered, yet never colonized at various points by all of Europe and Asia's major empires. Issa, a natural storyteller, recounts the history and mythology of his native city with verve and vivacity, zipping from Alexander's grand design of a corridor to the wealth of Egypt, through millennia of religious, educational, scientific, and artistic revolutionaries and visionaries. The famed lost Alexandrian library once hosted the School of Medicine, the most respected and widely known in the world, where Galen and Hippocrates laid the groundwork for modern pharmacology. Cleopatra's rise to power was inextricably linked to the city, as she herself formed the link between Greek, Egyptian, and Syrian family roots. Hypatia, the leading light of science and philosophy, taught there, until Christian fanaticism destroyed her as it expanded throughout Africa. Seizing this city of architectural marvels, Napoleon Bonaparte modeled himself on Alexander as he launched his eastern campaign of conquest. In an era beset by strident ethnic division and half-hearted forays into "diversity," how marvelous to be reminded of the glorious multiculturalism of one of our greatest ancient cities.
COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.