The World: A Family History

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The premise is ostensibly about family, but it’s really an accounting of power, violence, and conquest not dissimilar from other books.

Often I wondered if one would be better off with this or a 30 year old world history textbook and quite frankly I think that the latter might have been a better read at times.Second, which is more disturbing, is that the author uses a lot of vulgar language before introducing another sub-chapter in this book. I read The Romanovs a few years ago, and it is still, until this day, one of my favourite Non-Fiction books of all time. Because there is was so much information, the brief information we get on each family constantly left me wanting more about each family, some more than others but I was left unsatisfied for the entire book.

A dazzling achievement as spellbinding as fiction, The World captures the whole human story in a single, masterful narrative. A historical novel that builds into a nail-biting drama … a world that resembles… Edith Wharton with the death penalty. It is a conglomeration of gory violence; sexual activity, particularly favouring slightly eccentric varieties, and rape; excessive alcohol and drug-usage; and general scatology. On occasion, the references to the West display the contemporary predilection for showing the West it is not as smart, creative, powerful, etc as it is presumed to think it is.What about some positive things to say about those individuals who have made some good contribution for the welfare of the masses? But they used very broad brushes and, interesting though their works may be, they adopted the absurd expedient of barely mentioning anywhere outside Europe, a small sliver of the Middle East and North America, where less than 20 per cent of the world’s population have ever existed. Not unexpectedly, there are periodic lapses in the text, some of them the responsibility of editors (imagine being given this to edit! He has now completed his Moscow Trilogy of novels featuring Benya Golden and Comrade Satinov, Sashenka, Dashka and Fabiana. China will halve, its power and economy possibly challenged by the drawbacks of its own autocracy; the US will remain much the same, its ingenious power, however flawed and fragile, likely to endure longer than doomsayers predict.

This is world history on the grandest 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 center of the human drama,” said the publishers in a statement. Another aspect of this is his custom of blithely suggesting he is the only historian to have recognised or understood some particular matter. And it’s clear that, in the author’s view, neoliberal capitalists are good and communist and socialists are bad. There is such a thing as too much history," Montefiore concludes at the end of his 1300-page tome, and it's hard to disagree. Third, because the sensational sells well, why not describe in most of its pages sexual murder, incest, corruption, depravation, burnings, etc?

While I do like learning about how those who came before us were just as depraved and sex-obsessed as we are, the author occasionally seemed preoccupied with genitals and genital mutilation.

Some are creative, from Socrates, Michelangelo and Shakespeare to Newton, Mozart, Balzac, Freud, Bowie and Tim Berners-Lee. Montefiore does move into these areas, but only towards the end of the book, when it becomes, I think, a far more interesting work. Thus, it’s a tale of sex and violence; rather like reading a long historical novel with far too many characters, no coherent plot, and no neat beginning or end. 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. In that sense it’s a pity the Covid lockdown didn’t last longer – forcing him to flesh it all out by another thousand pages or so.audiobook - perhaps should have put this down as a DNF since skipped many parts during the latter 1/3 of it. I did not enjoy the book itself, but I believe it will add context and depth to future, far more limited, narrations of specific historical events and people. I was mesmerised by this comprehensive look at world history and ultimately saddened to realise that, throughout the years, conflict, death and the suffering of millions of humans usually begin with the greed of a few.