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ClareR (5726 KP) rated The Pumilio Child in Books

Apr 6, 2018

The Pumilio Child

Judy McInerney | 2018 | Fiction & Poetry

8.0

(1 Ratings)

Book Rating

Ya Ling is kidnapped from her well-off Chinese family and sold in to slavery in 15th century Italy. Mantegna, a Renaissance artist, buys her with money that he can't really afford to spend, and takes her home to a very disapproving wife and household.
Ya Ling is admirable calm and stoic through all of her trials and tribulations, and eventually work as a respected healer, as her family taught her back in China.
The author really makes you feel for the characters in her novel - pity and later pride for Ya Ling, and hatred for some of the less virtuous male characters. It's a book that reflects the times very well: men, and men in the church especially, hold all the cards. Women are held in very low esteem. And women who are in any way different from the accepted norms are in danger of the ecclesiastical courts.
I read this on 'The Pigeonhole', a social reading platform, and really enjoyed the whole experience.

Kudos

David McK (3425 KP) rated The Philosophy Book in Books

Jan 30, 2019

With over 2000 years of history, no book could seek to cover each and every aspect of philosophical thought.

What this does, instead, is to give a broad overview of the main works of the main thinkers (SOcrates, Plato, Descartes, Karl Marx, etc) of any particular era, with the book itself split into 6 main sections, as follows:

1) The Ancient World (700 BCE - 250 CE)
2) The Medieval World (250 - 1500)
3) Renaissance and the Age of Reason (1500 - 1750)
4) The Age of Revolution (1750 - 1900)
5) The Modern World (1900 -1950)
6) Contemporary Philosophy (1950 - present)

Nicely illustrated throughout, and with a little bit of history on the thinker themselves, this is a good intro for anybody interested in the subject. (Speaking personally, the closer the philosophy got to contemporary years, the less interesting I found it - I was more interested in the likes of Plato, Socrates and Descartes, for instance, than in Jacques Derrida).