"The West: A New History in 14 Lives" by Naoise Mac Sweeney

If you believe western civilization is the result of a single cultural inheritance extending from ancient Greece to modern times, historian Naoise (pronounced Knee-sha) Mac Sweeney suggests you think again.That concept is a powerful figment of our collective imagination, she says, delivering some of her evidence in the form of a new book, "The West: A New History in 14 lives."How did she arrive at the 14 individuals she wrote about? "I just wanted to capture a range of personalities--not just kings and queens or great generals--but I wanted to get more of everyday people," Sweeney told Steve Tarter.That's if people like Abu Yusuf Ya'qub ibn Ishaq as-Sabbah al-Kindi, a Muslim philosopher, mathematician, physician and music theorist who lived in 9th-century Baghdad, could be called an everyday person.Al-Kindi stirred Sweeney's interest, she said, the more she researched his work--hundreds of treatises from astrology to zoology. He touched on subjects as varied as the astronomy, jewelry and the tides, even writing about how to remove stains from clothing, said Sweeney.Other figures in "The West" include Herodotus, the Greek historian of the 5th century B.C., Phillis Wheatley, an 18th century African American poet, and Carrie Lam, "until very recently the chief executive of Hong Kong," she said. The 14 characters cited by Sweeney span the millennia and the continents, representing different religions, varying levels of wealth and education, diverse traditions and nationalities. Each life tells us something unexpected about the age in which it was lived and offers us a piece of the puzzle of how the modern idea of the West developed—and why we’ve misunderstood it for too long.