Though I’m generally not a fan of lengthy historical tomes—I can do without yet another battle-by-battle account of the Civil War or World War II—I sometimes enjoy sweeping, global histories that take in numerous cultures, time periods, and historical figures large and small. Two such books will be publishing this month.
The first one is doorstop-length (more than 1,300 pages), but its wealth of globe-spanning material and expert storytelling make it well worth reading over the course of a few weeks or months. According to our starred review, The World: A Family History of Humanity by British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore (Knopf, May 16) is a “richly detailed history of the world through the stories of families across place and time.” A consummate historian whose other titles include The Romanovs, Jerusalem, and Young Stalin, Montefiore spent more than 30 years researching this “panoramic, abundantly populated” history.
What I like most about this book is the scope, as the author moves from Mesopotamian culture all the way up to the present, revealing how family dynamics have driven much of world history. As our reviewer writes, “some families that Montefiore examines are familiar to most readers—Medici, Bonaparte, Romanov, Habsburg, and Rockefeller—but Montefiore’s view is capacious, as he recounts the histories of Chinese, Indian, Middle Eastern, Hawaiian, and African dynasties as well as the more recent Bushes, Kennedys, Castros, and Kims.” This one is a can’t-miss for history buffs, but it will also appeal to fans of lush cultural history.
More tightly focused but equally well rendered and prodigiously researched is The West: A New History in Fourteen Lives by Naoíse Mac Sweeney (Dutton, May 23), a professor of classical archaeology at the University of Vienna. In a starred review, our critic writes, “the Enlightenment may have had its good points, but as prizewinning British scholar Mac Sweeney notes, it was thoroughly racialized in its mania for classification, leaving little room in the rise of the West for ‘someone like me (female, mixed-race) [who] did not belong in a tradition personified by…elite white men.’ ” Mac Sweeney’s broad narrative begins with Herodotus and runs up through Edward Said and Carrie Lam, the chief executive of Hong Kong—“a place,” writes the author, “where the cultural, political, social, and economic traditions of the West overlap and interact with those of China.”
In between, Mac Sweeney chronicles the lives and work of a few household names (Said, Francis Bacon, Phillis Wheatley), but she truly excels in her excavation of long-forgotten historical figures, including ninth-century Muslim philosopher Al-Kindi; Theodore Laskaris, emperor of Nicaea from 1205 until his death in 1221; 16th-century Italian poet Tullia D’Aragona; Safiye Sultan, the mother of an Ottoman sultan, who rose from being an enslaved child to becoming an empress in 11 years; and 17th-century monarch Njinga of Angola, whose life, notes Mac Sweeney, “illustrates how racialized ideas formed, reformed, and informed Western imperialism in Africa.” The author should be commended for bringing these lives out of the dustbins of history and tying them together to demonstrate her thesis that “the grand narrative of Western civilization is factually wrong,” the “evidential basis” for which “has long crumbled.” Her text, our critic concludes, is “a highly readable, vigorous repudiation of the Western-centric school of history.”
Eric Liebetrau is the nonfiction and managing editor.
