Archive for November, 2009
Visit Stanford Alumni Association’s “What to Read” blog, featuring our own Gerry Elman
Our club’s webmaster, Gerry Elman, has recently been recruited to serve as a regular blogger at the Stanford Alumni Association’s new site called “What to Read.”
Gerry’s first posting there is about Paul Levinson’s time-travel novel The Plot to Save Socrates.
The novel features a character named Sierra Waters who encounters what seems to be an ancient Greek manuscript that suggests that Socrates might have been offered an alternative to death by drinking hemlock. Instead a non-sentient clone of Socrates might have been substituted at the last moment for the real philosopher, and Socrates would have been catapulted to the future a la H. G. Wells’ time machine.
In the story we also meet the ingenious Heron of Alexandria (150? BC-AD 250?), described as a prolific inventor of devices that embodied principles two thousand years ahead of their mass application in the industrial age. Sierra falls in love with the handsome and charming Alcibiades (450-404 BC), a brilliant student of Socrates who became an Athenian general. And somewhere in space and time, Sierra gets involved with William Henry Appleton (1814-1899) who headed the D. Appleton publishing company and published in the U.S.A. writings of Lewis Carroll, Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer and other leading nineteenth-century philosophers and scientists.
C’mon over for a visit and you’re welcome to leave a Comment.
