A review by spacestationtrustfund
The Rise and Fall of Alexandria: Birthplace of the Modern Mind by Justin Pollard, Howard Reid

2.0

Cities in and of themselves don't tend to be very interesting, and I was initially very sympathetic when this book veered away from the history of Alexandria itself into a fun and exciting guestbook of every notable visitor to the undeniably important but exhaustingly overrated Great Library. I did not learn very much new information from this book; the intended audience is certainly laypersons. If you're interested in learning a bit about why Alexandria was such an important city in Western classical antiquity, this book is fine. There are a handful of errors, most of which aren't incredibly important, although some are problematic, such as when the book claims that Copernicus originally referenced the supposed "impiety" of Aristarchus's theory of heliocentrism in his De revolutionibus, a misconception born of a bad translation which is so unfortunately prevalent that it has its own section of Aristarchus's English-language Wikipedia page.