Leo Africanus

Mon, 11/28/2005 - 6:09pm by Tim

Jonathan Rodgers, Head, Near East Division, University of Michigan Library

Amin Maalouf; translated by Peter Slugett, Leo Africanus. Chicago: New Amsterdam Books, 1992, c1988.

Amin Maalouf's historical novel tells the story of the life of Leo Africanus, Hasan al-Wazzan, born in Granada, Spain, around 1488, shortly before the fall of Muslim rule to the Christians and the exile of his family with other Muslims to Fez, Morocco. Leo travelled in North Africa and the Mediterranean to Timbuktu, Cairo, and Rome, where he was baptized a Christian, and wrote his "Description of Africa," on which the remarkable and highly enjoyable novel is based. He returned to Tunis in 1527.

Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Reads: Galileo's Daughter

Mon, 09/19/2005 - 1:58pm by TimG

This is one of three titles under consideration for this year's Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Reads, which will focus on Revolutions In Science: the people, theories, explanations and discoveries that challenged our thinking and changed the world.

The son of a musician, Galileo never left Italy, though his inventions and discoveries were heralded around the world. Most sensationally, his telescopes allowed him to revel a new reality in the heavens and reinforce the astounding argument that the earth moves around the sun. For this belief, he was brought before the Holy Office of the Inquisition, accused of heresy and forced to spend his last years under house arrest.

Inspired by a long fascination with Galileo, and by the remarkable surviving letters of Galileo's daughter, a cloistered nun, Sobel wrote this biography. Moving between Galileo's public life and his daughter's sequestered world, he illuminates the era when humanity's perception of its place in the cosmos was being overturned and when one man sought to reconsile the Heaven he revered as a good Catholic with the heavens he revealed through his telescope.

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Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Reads: Beak of the Finch

Mon, 09/19/2005 - 1:44pm by TimG

This is one of three titles under consideration for this year's Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Reads, which will focus on Revolutions In Science: the people, theories, explanations and discoveries that challenged our thinking and changed the world.

On a desert island in the heart of the Galapagos archipeglago, where Darwin received his first inklings of the theory of evolution, two scientists, Peter and Rosemary Grant, have spent twenty years proving that Darwin did not know the strength of his own theory. For among the finches of Daphne Major, natural selection is neither rare nor slow: it is taking place by the hour and we can watch.

In this dramatic story of groundbreaking scientific research, Jonathan Weiner follows these scientists as they watch Darwin's finches and come up with a new understanding of life itself.

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Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Reads: A Fish Caught in Time

Mon, 09/19/2005 - 1:33pm by TimG

This is one of three titles under consideration for this year's Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Reads, which will focus on Revolutions In Science: the people, theories, explanations and discoveries that challenged our thinking and changed the world.

The coelacanth (see-lo-canth) is no ordinary fish. Five feet long, with luminescent eyes and limb like fins, this bizarre creature, presumed to be extinct, was discovered in 1938 by an amateur icthyologist who recognized it from fossils dating back 400 million years. The discovery was immediately dubbed the "greatest scientific find of the century," but the excitement that ensued was even more incredible. This is the entrancing story of that most rare and precious fish — our own great-uncle forty million times removed.

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