Negative Positive
Title: 1,500 Years of Philosophy Made Fun and Smart
Review: The subtitle of this book is a history of philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance, but that can be slightly misleading. It is in fact what it claims but it is also much more and a little less. The little less is that only the book's last two chapters cover the period after the death of Aristotle but anyone who has slogged through medieval philosophy will appreciate and understand the author's choices. The good news is how deftly the author, Anthony Gottlieb, covers the topics and philosophers selected. The Dream of Reason is a wonderfully comprehensible volume that glorifies the Greeks, certainly not for getting it precisely right, but for expanding the attempts to actually get it (it, of course, being a simple word covering a multitude of complex ideas.) This book is always intelligent and very entertaining. There is no better single place for a reader to go to cover this vast period of time.
Is the review positive or negative? 