Why
I Read This Book
I’m
curious, does anyone actually enjoy
these short history of the world books?
People who like history, people like me, tend to hate these books
because we want to read about all the juicy interesting details that a book
like this must inevitably leave out. And
as for people who don’t like history….well, they would hate this book by
definition, wouldn’t they?
But
most of us eventually read a book like this because we feel like we
should. And indeed, although they’re not
always fun to read, books like this do perform a useful function. There’s simply too much history for all of us
to become experts in everything, and at a certain point we have to resort to
summary books like this to fill in the gaps in our knowledge. (In my own case, for example, I know very
little of the history of Europe in the period directly after the fall of the
Roman Empire, and I know virtually nothing about the history of India, China
and really all of Asia before the 19th Century.)
So
a book like this is useful for filling in the gaps in my knowledge. Even if it doesn’t go into any details, it
still would (hopefully) give me a rough idea of what was happening.
But
the real reason I picked this book up was because it was available on audio book. A real book requires some time commitment to sit down and
read it, but an audio book can just be casually put on while I’m exercising or cleaning
or doing some sort of other mindless task, and therefore I tend to listen to a
lot of books on audio that I might never - have - read - in - print.
Background
Information
Although I’m
just getting around to it now, this was an audio book I discovered 4 years ago
when I was living in Australia. The University library had a number of audio
books on CD available for loan. I copied
several of them onto my computer, with the intention of getting around to them
later.
Some
of these audio books I listened to and reviewed, like Turn Right at Istanbul by Tony Wright, and The Butterfly in Amber by Kate Forsyth , were, I believe, titles and authors not widely
known outside of Australia.
So
it is with this one. People on the
Internet describe the author, Geoffrey Blainey, as the most famous historian
inside of Australia,
but to the best of my knowledge he’s not widely known outside the country.
The
frequent references to Australia
and comparisons to Australian geography in this book, indicate that it’s
intended for an Australian audience.
(Although, I don’t know, possibly there’s an international version which
reads slightly different?)
The
book was originally published as A Short
History of the World in 2000. It was abridged as A Very Short History of the World in 2007. The audio book that I listened to is yet a
further abridgement—so it’s an abridged version of the abridged version of a
book specifically calling itself a Short
History of the world. With a
pedigree like that, I suppose I shouldn’t complain that the book seldom goes
into details.
The
Review
Perhaps I
would be harder on this book if I had read the print version, but there’s very
little to complain of in an audio book.
I learned very little from it, and the author spent most of his time
talking in generalities (some of them very questionable), but so what? The book was mildly entertaining, and it kept
my brain occupied for several hours while I caught up on various chores. I’d say the book performed its function.
It
is, of course, almost impossible to write a truly engaging short history of the
world. There’s no time to get into the
details and personalities that make history interesting, and a summary history,
the impersonal story of faceless empires just rising and falling, is bound to
be boring.
To
his credit, Geoffrey Blainey tries to alleviate this problem somewhat by
occasionally slowing the pace down somewhat and lingering a little bit over the
biographical portraits of some of the important historical figures. But the majority of his book still has to be
broad sweeping statements.
History
textbooks of previous generations were famous for trying to overload children
with the names of too many kings and battles and dates. Since then, the trend has been to focus more
on how people in each age of history actually lived—what the common people ate,
and what sort of clothes they wore, and what they did to earn a living.
Geoffrey
Blainey follows this trend, and this history is mostly a social history of the
common man.
But
as a history nerd, I almost go in more for the stories of kings and battles
than I do for the descriptions of what people ate 300 years ago. By the time I was finished with this book, I
was sick of hearing about how people’s diet had changed yet again with the
opening of new trade or the discovery of a new technology. I think I would almost have preferred to have
been overloaded with names and dates and battles in the old-school history
textbook style.
But
that’s just my personal preference.
Doubtless some people will find Geoffrey Blainey’s approach preferable.
The
other big emphasis in the book is religion.
(In his introduction, Geoffrey Blainey highlighted how important he
views religion is given how much impact it has had, and continues to have, on
human lives). Of the few times when
Geoffrey Blainey breaks away from his broad view and goes into a biographical
portrait, almost all of them are about religious figures: Jesus, Mohammed,
Confucius*, Buddha, Martin Luther and John Calvin. (If memory serves, Hinduism gets a bit
overlooked, probably because there’s no one biographical story associated with
it.) Near the end of the book, Geoffrey
Blainey notes how human society has moved from an intensely religious outlook
to a post-religious outlook, and tries to suggest the reasons for this. (This is perhaps another area where the book
shows its Australian outlook. Although Australia, England
and much of Europe has entered a post-religious age, this is not true of all
areas of the world, and certainly not true of the United States.)
Another
re-occuring theme throughout the book is globalization. (It’s a theme that gets perhaps hit a few
times too often, as Geoffrey Blainey keeps needing to tell the reader how each
historical age was more globally interconnected than the one before it.) The book ends with musings on how
interconnected human society now is, and suggests that now for the first time
in history, a world government may be possible.
Reading
this book in 2014, the ending seems to miss the mark somewhat. As we are on the brink of an ecological catastrophe, the big question for the future now seems to be whether human
society can adopt to the rising temperatures and mass extinctions. But when the first edition of this book was
published back in 2000, global warming and overpopulation were not
as much in the news as they are now.
Nitpicks
I caught a
few factual mistakes in this book. Some
of them, to be fair, quite minor. For
example. James became the head of the Christian Church after Jesus died, not Peter as Geoffrey Blainey claims. And Angkor Wat was originally built as a
Hindu temple, not Buddhist.
There
are also all sorts of nitpicks you could make about interpretations of
historical documents. Geoffrey Blainey
at times takes ancient documents too literally, not seeming to realize that
ancient Greek and Roman historians often inflated their numbers. Also he at times takes ancient religious documents
too literally, reporting on the Exodus from Egypt as if it were an historical
event. (In fact modern archeology has cast significant doubt on the story of the Exodus and the conquest of Canaan)
The myth of Buddha is also reported as if it were real history. Some of this may be because a short book like
this doesn’t have time to get into questioning the established narrative.
Then
there were any number of value statements or interpretive statements I
disagreed with. (Geoffrey Blainey says
that the United States
did much to spread democracy in the 20th century, but in fact the record is a
bit mixed. Although the United States
encouraged democracy in some parts of the world, it overthrew democratic governments in other parts.)
I’ve
only listed a few example above, but there was a lot more that I disagreed with
in this book. I was constantly listening
to this book and thinking to myself, “No, that’s not quite right.”
In
the past, I’ve tried to make exhaustive lists of everything I’ve disagreed with
in certain - books, but I’m not going to do that here. Partly because details are bound to get
fudged and oversimplified in a short history of the world, and partly because
this was an audio book, and all of the words were just floating in the air and
difficult for me to quote and reference them exactly.
I’ll
just say that I disagreed with much of the interpretations in this book, and
leave it at that.
Footnotes
* (I
know Confucius isn’t technically a religious figure, but his philosophy has
inspired a religious-like devotion in many parts of the world, which I imagine
is why Geoffrey Blainey includes him on this list.)
Link of the Day
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1 comment:
Update from a newer post: http://joelswagman.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-early-middle-ages-284-1000-with.html
In his book, A Very Short History of the World , Geoffrey Blainey says that the Viking colony in Greenland came to an end because of Climate Change (The end of the Medieval Warming period). Being a complete naive on this subject, I just accepted that this was the established history.
Paul Freedman, however, points out that this theory is actually quite controversy, and not at all the established historical version.
Yet another reminder that you can't trust everything you read.
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