disjointed | When Asia Was the World

A New Perspective on Exploration | When Asia Was the World | Stewart Gordon

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	• When Asia Was the World Stewart Gordon Da Capo Press, 2007 - 240 pages average customer review:based on 10 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Engaging and fun- a cool book!

Like most people brought up in the American public school system my knowledge of Asian history consisted of "China invented noodles and gunpowder and then Europe took over and some Chinese guys thought that their kung ku was so good that bullets couldn't hurt them". When I got older I learned that there was a LOT more to it than that but really- it was all pretty vague. Stewart Gordon's book is an excellent remedy to this problem. The scope is broad (500-1500CE!) but the book never feels sketchy. Gordon arranges it around 8 travelers accounts and so he takes us from one end of Asia to the other following real people on their *real* adventures. WOW!

The extensive notes in the back provide lots of pointers to further reading if you're inspired to hunt up any of the original accounts or the hard-core scholarship.

A great book and one I'm recommending to friends.

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disjointed

Although generally interested in all types of historical reviews, I found this book to be highly fragmented. Attempts to put the chapters together didn't seem to work. They just didn't flow. Overall just an average read.

A New Perspective on Exploration

Reading this book opened my eyes to a prejudice that I never knew I had. I love stories about explorers - Marco Polo, Lewis & Clark, Harrison Forman, etc., but I never thought about the Asian explorers whose trips spread culture throughout the known world. Stewart Gordon passionately recounts their stories and their contributions to civilization in this wonderful collection of narratives of great Asian travelers who represented the forefront of learning. It is a good lesson to learn these days when, after 500 years, the Asian world is again emerging as the center of activity. I recommend this book to anyone looking for new stories of travel and adventure. I was not familiar with any of the figures whose stories are told in the book and now realize that their contributions were every bit as important as the explorers we are taught to revere in the West.

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Geography and history fans will love this book.

Geography and history fans will love this book. From 500 A.D. to 1500 A.D., Asia led the world and this book tells how and why."

A compelling, lively account

Before Marco Polo and other noted world explorers there was cultural and commercial trade around the world: Asia had its own explorers, traders and travelers who crossed the globe to exchange ideas. Research scholar Stewart Gordon has traveled the world to examine original texts in science, history, philosophy and sociology to create WHEN ASIA WAS THE WORLD, and here provides an Asian focus unique in the world of Western focuses on exploration. His stories of travelers and explorers of Asia provides a compelling, lively account perfect not just for high school and college collections, but for general-interest lending libraries strong in history and culture, especially Asian history.

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While European intellectual, cultural, and commercial life stagnated during the early medieval period, Asia flourished as the wellspring of science, philosophy, and religion. Linked together by a web of religious, commercial, and intellectual connections, the different regions of Asia?s vast civilization, from Arabia to China, hummed with commerce, international diplomacy, and the brisk exchange of ideas. Stewart Gordon has fashioned a fascinating and unique look at Asia from A.D. 700 to 1500, a time when Asia was the world, by describing the personal journeys of Asia?s many travelers-the merchants who traded spices along the Silk Road, the apothecaries who exchanged medicine and knowledge from China to the Middle East, and the philosophers and holy men who crossed continents to explore and exchange ideas, books, science, and culture.

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