The Sand-Reckoner

Delightful! Archimedes as a young man, building catapults to help defend Syracuse against the Romans. Archimedes plays the flute, the aulos. The descriptions of music were the best parts of the book! Yeah Archimedes and Einstein were probably similar! Yeah I have rubbed shoulders with some serious math / physics types whose heads were off in the clouds.

Great fleshed out characters here, the King and his sister, the slave Marcos.

This is the story of Archimedes, the math genius. Because of his father's health, he has to return home to Syracuse away from wondrous Alexandria, home to the most advanced thinkers of the times.

It's a story of a man who just wanted to do geometry. Easily distracted, Archimedes would stop what he doing to do his calculations on the sand beneath his feet and get lost for hours. I have a found a soul mate (not that I have his math skills but I have been known to get lost in thought for hours at a time).

It's also a story about Marcus, his slave. Not as many reviews mentioned him. I actually kind of miss the past week of spending time with Archimedes and Marcus.

For Gillian Bradshaw, the author, she admitted at the end she struggled with show more incorporating math into the story but I think she did an admirable job. Math as a subject was there and it made sense and didn't muddle the story down into a math lesson. show less

My children and I read this together as part of the Building Your Library Level 8 curriculum.

We loved reading this book. It's perhaps a little melodramatic at times, but the characters seemed realistic and Archimedes seemed more real to us than he had when we'd read about him other places. It's difficult to imagine what life was like in ancient times, and books like this help to remind us that people from long ago were still people and, despite different customs and hygiene and social structures, not really all that different from people today.

We all appreciated the ending, too. We weren't particularly happy about it, but it was a good ending.

I didn't really enjoy the beginning of this one, but it got really good after the start. Some of the passages about Archimedes' wonder and awe over mathematics etc. were really lovely.
It has good prose, and some of it was surprising, in a good way. However, while most of the ending was happy and well done, there was one particular event which I really did not like. It didn't match the tone of the ending, in addition to making me upset. Other than that, a good read.

I have shiny sparkly hearts in my eyes. Plot I understand and historical accuracy and complex characters and they talk to each other and they have relationships with each other and these relationships change because there are consequences for actions and the hero is a math genius and omg the only thing I regret is that I cannot read this again for the first time.

This was a light summer reading book. The sand reckoner is Archimedes, and he is home from Alexandria to help in the siege at Syracuse. He becomes famous as the catapult builder for the city, and also pursues a love affair with the sister of the King. His slave, Marcus, has a brother among the Romans besieging the city, and eventually this slave is in trouble for it. The book is supposedly about the time of the First Punic War. The Romans are attacking Syracuse, on Sicily, for the advantage it would give them over Carthage. The king of Syracuse is almost too good to be true in this novel, but the story was very skillfully handled.

I really enjoyed this first reading of a Gillian Bradshaw book. Thought the characters were well drawn and the story well described.