A well-written and valuable take on the diverse narratives that have shaped human history.
World history as “a story that we’re telling one another.”
In this intriguing account of humankind from the Stone Age to the present, Ansary (Road Trips: Becoming an American in the Vapor Trail of the Sixties, 2019, etc.) writes, “we live on the same planet but in many different worlds.” In 800 C.E., for instance, the Chinese thought their world was the world; other civilizations also believed they lived at the center of their own world model. The author argues that we invent the tribes and other social constellations—the culture—of our own world through narratives based on geographical differences. Viewing the past through this lens, he sees global history as a melding of many master narratives—a “drama of ever-increasing interconnectedness.” Trade, warfare, and other interactions caused separate worlds to overlap. “Neighbors influenced neighbors who influenced neighbors,” writes Ansary. When Rome conquered the Fertile Crescent, diverse belief systems became part of the Roman state. Jews, for example, encountered the secular-pagan ideas of the Greco-Roman world in their daily lives. The Crusades brought hundreds of ideas and innovations into Europe, from gunpowder to mechanical clocks. Pivotal moments triggered interconnections among major cultures, with great ripple effects: Columbus’ discovery of America sparked the rise of corporations and banks in Europe and drew the entire world into “one great global drama.” The advent of machines in the 18th and 19th centuries changed the division of labor between men and women. The invention of the transistor in 1947 heralded the digital age. As an Afghan American, the San Francisco–based author draws nicely on his experiences of life in the different worlds of Islam and the secular West to help readers understand the outcomes of overlapping narratives. He examines the role of interconnections in the development of everything from board games to belief systems, science, and multinational corporations.
A well-written and valuable take on the diverse narratives that have shaped human history.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-796-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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