Book Review: The Arab World Thought of It by Salma S. Hussain

Do you know who invented tents?  Or carpets?  Or bars of soap?  How about public libraries, where anyone could borrow a book?  Do you know who invented stained glass windows?  What about the first ever observatory so we could study the skies more accurately?  What about the scalpel, used in modern surgery?  

The Arab world actually invented all of these things and so much more.  Who are the Arab people, you ask?  A simple definition would be those people who can trace their ancestry back to the Middle East and North Africa (called Arabia then), and whose original language was Arabic.  This is not a definition everyone agrees on, as this book explains, but this is a good starting place.  This book even gives you a map so you can locate the countries.  It also shows you how the Arabs grew from small nomadic tribes into over 10 countries.  There are, of course, many Arabs who live all over the world now, too. 

I was very impressed with the amount of information included in this book that is also written for a middle grade audience to understand.  I was doubly impressed the author included a section specifically for contributions by Arabic women.  There are also several places in which pronunciations are included, for example, a caliph named al-Mamun (pronounced al-mamoon).  Al-Mamun is very important in the Arab world.  Find out why some historians call him the "master of Arab civilization."

Did you know that the stars in the Big Dipper constellation all have Arabic names because they were all discovered by the Arabs?

Arabs invented crystal drinking glasses like this one.

Did you know the Arabs were the first to drink coffee?  

Did you know the first attempt at constructing and flying a machine was by an Arab in 852 CE?

Did you know the idea of three-course meals was invented in the 9th century CE by an Arabic man named Ziryab, when he was asked by the court of Spain to teach them how to live a more elegant lifestyle?

So many interesting facts in this book!

I really loved seeing this building in the country of Saudi Arabia that was designed to look just like a book!  

This book is full of bright, vivid photographs of Arab people, mosques, landscapes, and the inventions described in the book.  


VOCABULARY TIDBITS: caliph and caliphate, planetarium, astrolabe, surgical needle, oud, catgut stitches, antiseptic, cataract, glaze, calligraphy, arabesque decorations, torpedo, midfa, tabboulah, sfiha, hajj, machicolations, minarets, sultan, skybridges

BOOK BRIEFS:
10 and up, 48 pages
ACM (Arts, Crafts, Music)
CD (Cultural Diversity)
HIS (Historical/History)
I (Insightful)
INFO (Informative)
T (Travel)
V (Vocabulary Enhancement)

I give this book 5 BOOKWORMS.  

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Olympic Review Series: Hour of the Olympics (The Magic Tree House #16) by Mary Pope Osborne

The Magic Tree House transports Jack and his younger sister Annie on another adventure into the past, this time back to the Olympics of Ancient Greece.  But in Ancient Greece, females are not allowed in the arena.  Annie tells Jack to go to the games without her, but Jack knows that Annie would not tell him to do that unless she had some kind of plan up her sleeve.  However, this is ancient Greece.  How is Annie going to pull this off?  And what does a flying horse have to do with anything?

I really liked this jaunt into the earliest days of the Olympics.  The similarities and differences from those early days in Greece to the 2012 Olympics in London are fun to discover.  I am a big fan of this series as a whole, anyway.  It is a "Magic School Bus" for middle grade fiction.  Sometimes by this reading level the imaginative stories are fewer.  In my opinion, imaginations need to be nourished as much as any other part of the mind.  Osborne manages to deftly combine the elements of imagination, curiosity, history, and mystery without it ever feeling trite or dumbed-down.


AGES: 8-12

BOOK BRIEFS:

HIS
INFO
MYS
S
SF
T
V