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Customer Review
- Reviewed in Canada on May 24, 2016This is one of those books that come across your lap rarely, yet have the power to both educate and entertain. The subject of the book is us: humanity, and how we've evolved over the past many years, how some of our cultural issues have evolved, and where we could go in the future. To say the book is wide-ranging is an understatement: this is a book about everything we care about as humans.
The book examines human history from early days of walking through each of the major revolutions and evolutions: the move to argricultural peoples instead of wander-gatherers; the birth of the concepts of town and cities and the need to manage them; the development of tools, touching on everything to the current day; how societies arose; our warlike nature; the technological leaps that created engines and paper, as well as everything else we depend on; and how we interact with the world around us. To say this is a massive subject is so much of an understatement as to be laughable, yet this book tackles it all, in levels of detail that make it clear why each step in the process is critical and important, and yet never getting bogged down. We've got science, we've got religion, we've got politics, and we've got everything else thrown in too.
All of this in an eminently readable book: you can enjoy the process of reading these pages, seeing how the author builds, chapter over chapter, to spin the big story. You can see where issues arise and how we solved them, or, in some cases, why they still remain problems. There's a lot of words here, without many illustrations to break it up, but if you are patient, the value of this book is immense. Easily the most "important" book I've read for years, covering such a massive subject in a way that I enjoyed reading about. Yes, this will require some effort on your part (not to read, but to understand the big picture) but it all is worth the effort. Want to know why we are the way we are? This book will help you understand exactly that. And it's an interesting read along the way.
