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Bernard Lewis's earlier book, "The Muslim Discovery Of Europe",was wonderful, a revelation of what can be learned by examining history from an unfamiliar point of view. The current book, "What Went Wrong?", adds nothing to the former. Based on three lectures delivered in German, the new book repeatedly promises insights in one chapter which it forgets to deliver in the next. In short, it's poorly organized. A more serious objection, however, is that Professor Lewis directs almost all his attention to the achievements and failures of the governing classes and the intellectual elites of the Middle East, whom he seems to hold responsible for the stagnation of Islam. Meanwhile, he shows rather little awareness of "what went right" in Europe during the 1400 years since the first Muslim expansion. His own previous work revealed the extent to which the Golden Age of Islam was dependent on inheritances from the Roman Empire, and on the productivity of Greek Christians, Jews, Visigoths, and others who lived under Muslim domination. Since the perceived decline of Islam more or less begins with the final assimilation or suppression of those subject cultures, perhaps things were never as "right" as they seemed. Likewise, the Dark Ages of Europe were not as abject as Lewis's interpretation would have them. At the time of the Domesday Boke, for instance, in the rude north of 11th Century England, there were more water-powered MACHINES than in all the realms of Islam. In terms of labor efficiency, Europe had outpaced Islam by 950 AD. Any profound comparison of the histories of Islam and Europe must begin at the base of the social pyramid, not at the tip. In Europe, the "learning" of bookish monastics, based on classical authority, proved in the long run far less important than the "learning" of miners, sailors, metal-workers, and masons. Islam had its share of the learned elite, but where were its artisan-inventors like Gutenburg and self-taught engineers like Galileo? Asking the wrong questions, Lewis is unable to offer even a plausible hypothesis to account for the successes of Europe and the failures of Islam.