The World: A Family History

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The book can read a bit tedious especially when I hit points in history I knew more about, but the earliest times and the more current I found to be the most interesting. The earliest because I didn't know much of those histories and the current, because it was interesting to look at modern times from the lens of history. Important and mesmerizing.” —Michael Beschloss, New York Times best-selling author of Presidents of War In this work of astonishing scope and erudition, Simon Sebag Montefiore interweaves the stories of the servants, courtiers, and kings, pioneers, preachers, and philosophers who have made history. A brilliant synthesis that will impart fresh insight to even the most learned readers.”— Henry Kissinger, former U.S. Secretary of State This book is one of the worst books ever written by a very respected historian. The problem starts quite at the beginning with the title: The World. It is NOT a world history, but the history of the elites and various famous families which ruled the many parts of the world. Thus, if you think that you will find some information or data or anything which describes the everyday life of such and such a group of people who were the common people, you will wait in vain.

Even with the length of this book, the history of the world is sometimes a pretty basic overview. I did like that families are a big part of the narrative. Any section that piques your interest should be followed up by finding other books that go in depth.This is more than schoolboy fun in a way – it puts our contemporary obsessions, both with talking about sex, and also with condemning such things: in a new light. We've always been at it. Second, which is more disturbing, is that the author uses a lot of vulgar language before introducing another sub-chapter in this book. I do not intend to even quote examples. This is a terrible thing to do.Never have I met something similar to this and trust me, I have read tens of thousands of books. Around 950,000 years ago, a family of five walked along the beach and left behind the oldest family footprints ever discovered. For award-winning historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, these poignant, familiar fossils serve as an inspiration for a new kind of world history, one that is genuinely global, spans all eras and all continents, and focuses on the family ties that connect every one of us. Montefiore’s novel approach is based on the argument that the family is the essential unit of human existence – even in the age of the iPhone, artificial intelligence, robotics and space travel. He uses the stories of multiple families over dozens of generations, living on every continent and in every era, to tell the human story.

Seriously good fun... the Soviet march on Berlin, nightmarish drinking games at Stalin's countryhouse, the magnificence of the Bolshoi, interrogations, snow, sex and exile... lust adultery and romance. Eminently readable and strangely affecting." Sunday Telegraph This is world history on the most grand and intimate scale - spanning centuries, continents and cultures, and linking grand themes of war, migration, plague, religion, medicine and technology to the people at the centre of the human drama. Montefiore’s] major achievement is to make us seetheworldthrough a different lens – to maketheunfamiliar familiar and, more important,thefamiliar unfamiliar. . . . [B]rings [history] most vividly, almost feverishly, to life.There is hardly a dull paragraph.” ― TheSpectatorUgaz’s case is all too familiar in Peru, where powerful groups regularly use the courts to silence journalists by fabricating criminal allegations against them.’