A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

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 Clive Ponting’s Green History of the World and William McNeill’s A World History.

Short it is, given the subject. Outdated and tedious, too.