A tour of global history by way of history’s most important scrolls, manuscripts, and printed books, from Plato and Homer to the twenty-first century—100 must reads.
Beautifully illustrated in full color, this book informs and entertains as it demonstrates how the power of the written word has shaped, changed, and even revolutionized the world.
Prize-winning author Scott Christianson brings together an exceptional collection of groundbreaking works that have changed the tide of history. Included are scriptures that founded religions, manifestos that sparked revolutions, scientific treatises that challenged ingrained beliefs, and novels that kick-started new literary movements.
This sweeping chronological survey highlights the most important books from around the globe, from the earliest illuminated manuscripts all the way to the digital age. Included are such well-known classics as the Odyssey, the Torah, Shakespeare’s First Folio, Moby-Dick, and Darwin’s On the Origins of Species, but an array of other works, some well-known and others less so, are featured as well, including those by Sun Tzu, Nicolaus Copernicus, Mary Wollstonecraft, Adam Smith, Henry David Thoreau, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, as well as more recent works by J. K. Rowling, Art Spiegelman, and Naomi Klein. This provocative collection is the perfect book for both literature lovers and history buffs.
I bought this on a whim, because it's just a gorgeous book, chock full of old book covers. I figured I'd be interested in the contents too, of course, but was prepared, based on the title, for a lot of hyperbole.
Not so much really. I'd say the editors did a fantastic job of choosing books that most people would agree significantly affected, if not changed, the course of society. I enjoyed the narratives written for each one too; I learned at least a little something about each book, in spite of at least 95 of them being familiar to me already.
I knocked the rating back a little because some of the choices would have had a more localised influence than others (A Book of Mediterranean Food and The Cat in the Hat come most quickly to mind), and because there was a slight but noticeable political bias to the choices. Whether that bias was the editors' or history's, I don't know, and I can't argue the impact most of these books had, so it's a pretty small quibble really.
A nice book for the bibliophile or the armchair historian who enjoys the trend of history through objects.
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11 July, 2018:
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11 July, 2018:
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