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Title details for The World by Simon Sebag Montefiore - Wait list

The World

A Family History of Humanity

by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Simon Sebag Montefiore
Audiobook
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A magisterial world history unlike any other that tells the story of humanity through the one thing we all have in common: families • From the author of The Romanovs
A Best Book of the Year: The New Yorker, Smithsonian

“Succession meets Game of Thrones.” —The Spectator • “The author brings his cast of dynastic titans, rogues and psychopaths to life...An epic that both entertains and informs.” —The Economist, Best Books of the Year
Around 950,000 years ago, a family of five walked along the beach and left behind the oldest family footprints ever discovered. 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 this epic, ever-surprising book, Montefiore chronicles the world’s great dynasties across human history through palace intrigues, love affairs, and family lives, linking grand themes of war, migration, plague, religion, and technology to the people at the heart of the human drama.
It features a cast of extraordinary diversity: in addition to rulers and conquerors, there are priests, charlatans, artists, scientists, tycoons, gangsters, lovers, husbands, wives, and children. There is Hongwu, the beggar who founded the Ming dynasty; Ewuare, the Leopard-King of Benin; Henry Christophe, King of Haiti; Kamehameha, the conqueror of Hawaii; Zenobia, the Arab empress who defied Rome; Lady Murasaki, the first female novelist; Sayyida al-Hurra, the Moroccan pirate-queen. Here too are moderns such as Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, and Volodymyr Zelensky. Here are the Caesars, Medicis and Incas, Ottomans and Mughals, Bonapartes, Habsburgs and Zulus, Rothschilds, Rockefellers and Krupps, Churchills, Kennedys, Castros, Nehrus, Pahlavis and Kenyattas, Saudis, Kims and Assads.
These powerful families represent the breadth of human endeavor, with bloody succession battles, treacherous conspiracies, and shocking megalomania alongside flourishing culture, moving romances, and enlightened benevolence. A dazzling achievement as spellbinding as fiction, The World captures the whole human story in a single, masterful narrative.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    May 16, 2023

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780593627679
      • File size: 1962816 KB
      • Duration: 68:09:11

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from March 20, 2023
      Violence, treachery, and sex are the motors of history in this sweeping chronicle. Historian and novelist Montefiore (The Romanovs) surveys wars, massacres, revolutions, plagues, famine, and socioeconomic transformations from the rise of the Mesopotamian city states to the Biden administration, giving China, India, Africa, central Asia, and pre-Columbian America as much space as the West. Focusing on ruling dynasties and their dysfunctions, Montefiore notes that the Ottoman Empire’s official succession procedure included royal sons killing each other off, and that the future Frederick the Great of Prussia was forced by his father to watch the beheading of his best friend for their presumed homosexual affair. Montefiore makes women central to the story, as queens and regents or as mothers and mistresses manipulating feckless kings. (They also hold their own in mayhem: the seventh-century Chinese royal concubine Miss Wu allegedly broke up Emperor Gaozong’s marriage by killing her own infant daughter and framing the Empress for murder.) And there’s plenty of sex, with the orgies of Rodrigo Borgia—aka Pope Alexander VI—perhaps taking the prize for debauchery. Setting a whirlwind pace, Montefiore skillfully guides readers through the tumult with elegant prose and evocative character sketches. It’s a bravura performance.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      This ambitious audiobook by the author of THE ROMANOVS offers a comprehensive global history in the tradition of Toynbee and Wells. It's a polished, richly detailed narrative that any one of the half dozen best members of this unwieldy ensemble, or a compatible three or four, could have made memorable. Instead, the listener encounters a bewildering variety of voices and accents, presumably reflecting the global scope of the narrative but that are highly uneven in talent and experience. Adding to the difficulty, narrators change frequently, often in the middle of episodes and following no apparent purpose or design. These constant arbitrary shifts in accent, pace, and aptitude shatter the narrative and tire the ear. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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