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Rating: 
Summary: interesting stuff
Review: fairly good piece of work... it manages to show a lot of the wisdom of the ages without having to spend hours sifting though plato or socrates translations. I prefered Phanes publishisher's _Pythagorean Sourcebook_ though...
Rating:
Summary: Arabic Wisdom Literature
Review: This book is not what I expected it to be. Nonetheless it did make for good reading. I was expecting from the descriptions (both on this website and from the book's backcover) an anthology of excerpts from lost works by the ancient Greek philosophers. It's well known that many ancient Greek manuscripts did survive the dark ages under the auspices of Islamic civilization. However, it doesn't take much reading to figure out that much (if not all) of what is in this book has the feel and sound of Arabic wisdom literature. It reminds me of some of the sayings attributed to the prophets in Islamic classical literature. And even that stuff sounds very different from what we have of the actual Biblical writers. On the positive side, the sayings are insightful and often offer very good advice. My favorite admonished parents to let their children get away with some of the excuses they make for themselves so that they don't get discouraged. As a parent of a 4 and 5 year old, I saw the value in that. For fans of the old Greeks, the more philosophical of the sayings are definitely in the Neoplatonic tradition and it is tempting to see a connection with Sufism here. But to do so might be a diservice to both traditions. They sprang from the same wellspring but they ran into different audiences.
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