A delightful read, gracefully written, and full of odd and interesting pieces of information as well as thoughtful comparisons.
A master story teller...[the book] grips and entertains...educates and informs...to be savored and possessed, not merely read.
A unique achievement.
Informative and interesting, and is accessible to readers at all levels.
Written for intelligent readers who enjoy a good read.
A delightful read, gracefully written, and full of odd and interesting pieces of information as well as thoughtful comparisons.
Informative and interesting, and is accessible to readers at all levels.
Written for intelligent readers who enjoy a good read.
A unique achievement.
A master story teller...[the book] grips and entertains...educates and informs...to be savored and possessed, not merely read.
Informative and interesting, and is accessible to readers at all levels.
Informative and interesting, and is accessible to readers at all levels.
Blainey, who published A Shorter History of Australia in 1994, now extends his efforts to the world. Another work about Australia, The Tyranny of Distance (1966), betrays his intellectual approach, namely, organizing his explanations around a single factor in this case, the effect of distance and technology upon society. Blainey discusses the various journeys humans have taken over the last four million years, the cultural contact that has resulted, and the factors that might have delayed or speeded up contact. For example, he explores the role of the Sahara Desert in the interplay among the various cultures surrounding that enormous barrier and shows that groups like the Mongols crossed huge spaces and barriers to influence peoples far from their homeland. Blainey also discusses the distances traveled by Islam, Christianity, and secular capitalism and the manner in which cultures located on different continents were and are influenced by such forces. Readers may complain that Blainey treats Africa only in light of its contact with the West, and that is true, but he does this for all cultures. He does pay more attention to Southeast Asia and Oceania than many historians, doubtless because of his Australian roots. Recommended. Clay Williams, Hunter Coll., CUNY Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
An unsatisfying attempt to pack the story of the human species into an attractively priced survey text. Blainey, retired professor of history at the University of Melbourne, apparently hasn't been keeping up with current scholarship. He writes that dinosaurs were "extinguished" 64 million years ago (except for all those species, that is, that survived to evolve into birds) and repeats the now largely abandoned thesis that humans entered the Americas by way of a land bridge across the Bering Strait (but only until "the rising seas-without warning-began to split America from the world," as if a warning were possible). He gains surer footing when he leaves prehistory for the better-documented climes of ancient Greece and the medieval Islamic empire, and comes into his own when he writes of technological innovations, such as the development of the clock and the printed book-though even here, he feels it necessary to point out the obvious (the German printing town of Wittenberg probably smelled like paper and ink, and "the Roman sundial often served as a rough clock but in cloudy weather or at night it was unable to reveal the time"). Cautiously academic, Blainey frequently guesses what historical figures were thinking or dreaming as they went about their daily lives; thus Jesus "probably saw himself as an orthodox Jew trying to rescue a spirit which was sometimes drowned by the rigid rules covering the Sabbath and a hundred other occasions and activities"), and Adolf Hitler "seemed to feel that he was guided by a mysterious force stronger than himself." But such guesses have little explanatory value. Nor does the work as a whole, especially compared to other one-volume histories like ClivePonting's Green History of the World and William McNeill's A World History. Short it is, given the subject. Outdated and tedious, too.
