Three decades ago an American historian named David Christian who was teaching at an Australian university at the time offered a new perspective on world history. His unique take on the subject took the discipline far beyond the limits of the written word. Calling it Big History, Christian started...
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A review of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann. @@@@@ (5 out of 5). There is persuasive evidence that the Americas before Columbus were far more heavily populated, the leading civilizations far more sophisticated, and their origins far further back in time than earlier generations of scholars had suspected.
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A review of 1493: Uncvovering the New World Columbus Created, by Charles C. Mann. @@@@@ (5 out of 5). One after another, this brilliant book brushes away a host of cherished myths that have grown up in the shadows of history.
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A review of Why the West Rules — for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future, by Ian Morris. @@@@@ (5 out of 5). In Why the West Rules, he explores the state of society and the quality of life in both West and East since long before the onset of written history in the first millennium BCE — in fact, since the passing of the last Ice Age 15,000 years ago. Morris’s ultimate goal is to discern the shape of times to come. His conclusion is noncommittal: “The great question for our times is not whether the West will continue to rule. It is whether humanity as a whole will break through to an entirely new kind of existence before disaster strikes us.”
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The surprises start on page three. “If one of our distant ancestors hadn’t been infected by a virus hundreds of millions of years ago,” Jonathan Kennedy writes, “humans would reproduce by laying eggs.” In Pathogenesis, Professor Kennedy sketches the often-decisive...
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The surprises start on page three. “If one of our distant ancestors hadn’t been infected by a virus hundreds of millions of years ago,” Jonathan Kennedy writes, “humans would reproduce by laying eggs.” In Pathogenesis, Professor Kennedy sketches the often-decisive...
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A review of The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate, by Robert D. Kaplan. @@@@@ (5 out of 5). A view of current events and U.S. policy from the perspective of geopolitics, grounded in geography and history.
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Thoughts while reading A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, by Gregory Clark. @@@@ (4 out of 5). This is yet another effort to answer the same profound question addressed in Guns, Germs, and Steel: why are some parts of the world so much richer than others? Clark reduces the bigger question to one that’s far more focused: why did the Industrial Revolution occur in Europe, and specifically England, and not somewhere else in the world? His answer will surprise you: beginning in the late Middle Ages rich people in England had more than twice the number of children surviving at death as the poorest people, so that over the centuries from 1200 to 1800 “bourgeois values,” the attitudes and behaviors that had made people rich, gradually took hold throughout society.
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Most historians date the emergence of globalization to the Columbian Exchange, the transfer across the Atlantic of goods, mineral resources, edible plants, slaves, and contagious diseases that began shortly after Christopher Columbus “discovered” the New World. Yale history professor...
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If you think history is a cold recitation of dates and the names of kings and battles, you owe it to yourself to check out Big History. And the best introduction I’ve found to that fascinating new field is Tamim Ansary’s brilliant 50,000-year survey, The Invention of Yesterday. Unlike...
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I’m sure you’ve found this, too: It’s damnably hard to get a handle on things. Every day, we’re inundated by thousands of bits and pieces of information—online, by mail, on our phones and laptops, and everywhere we walk on the streets of a city or the aisles of a grocery store. How does all this...
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Origin Story is historian David Christian’s valiant effort to cram the history of the universe into 300 pages. Historians typically trace the beginning of human history to the time some 5,000 years ago when people started committing language to writing. After all, history as practiced in...
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Yes, dinosaurs live today. You’ll learn a lot in this lively personal account by a passionate paleontologist. Quick: how many different species of dinosaurs can you name? T. rex, of course. Brontosaurus. Triceratops, maybe. Velociraptor, of Jurassic Park fame. Possibly also Pterodactyl...
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There is no gene for evil. Black people have no genetic predisposition to excel at sports. Tay-Sachs is not a Jewish disease. Native Americans are not genetically predisposed to alcoholism. And, of course, there is no such thing as a “race” in genetics. These are a few of the many popular myths...
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Historians of the ancient world have been telling us for centuries that from about 5,000 to 10,000 years ago larger and larger human communities formed in places like the Fertile Crescent, South China, the Indus River Valley of today’s western India and Pakistan, and Central America. To secure...
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Two decades ago a UCLA geography professor named Jared Diamond published Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, a book about economic development and its uneven effect on human society. Diamond hypothesized that the arc of human history was dramatically shifted by geographic,...
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UC Berkeley professor Walter Alvarez tackles the emerging field of Big History from his perspective as a geologist, viewing himself as “a historian of the Earth.” In A Most Improbable Journey, he writes about the universal context in which human life has emerged. Beginning with the Big...
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In 1989, an American history professor named David Christian was teaching at Macquarie University in Sydney when he offered a course entitled Big History. Rejecting historians’ definition of the discipline as beginning with the advent of written records just 5,500 years ago,...
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If you think of history as an account of kings, wars, and revolutions, you won’t find it in Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Nor will you find more than a smattering of familiar names of the “Great Men” who have supposedly bent the arc of history....
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Here’s capitalism reexamined, recasting the Industrial Revolution as a natural extension of the European mercantile expansion that preceded it. In Empire of Cotton, Harvard historian Sven Beckert asserts that the more familiar industrial capitalism that came...
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Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review,
with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review,
with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.
Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.