'History of the World' by J. M. Roberts

In terms of the universe we have just arrived, yet in our short time we have travelled far  as J. M. Roberts looks back on human existence in 'History of the World'.  How can one write such a book where each epoch requires detailed study in it's own right and also for it to be coherent to read?  With a lot of editing I imagine.  Yet going into our past has been absorbing; civilisations rising and falling, wars and inventions, centuries of stability and stagnation and decades of combustible innovation.  To know where we are is to look back as a means of going forward.

Clocking in at 1109 pages it is a bible of history that contains almost everything from Ice Age man to the Cold War.  First written in 1976 it is a gargantuan of social evolution making you appreciate the differences in culture and sensing the historical forces that guide present life.  There are some great stories here.  The conquer Alexander the Great meeting the philosopher Diogenes, the conversion of the Indian leader Asoka from a war faring man to peaceful man, and the Egyptian King Menes diverting the river Nile by a levee.  So this is a very rich book and all will be made rich by reading it.

It is, after all, our heritage that we can comfortably read at a our leisure with curiosity, excitement, fear and wonder.  But of course this is the point of view of one British scholar, as encompassing of a view that might be, whose general thrust might be different from say a Japanese scholar or a Mexican one.  People who write histories of the world may be seen to be the machos of the intellectual world who decide to write not just one thing but everything.  This is 'Moby Dick', it's 'Ulysses', it's big and it has something to prove.

As incomplete as it must be it is nonetheless an engaging summary of human life.  Decidedly academic, unlike Andrew Marr's recent version which is a rollicking tale from a story spinning journalist and has more juicier, plumbable, quote to be seized with joy and re-told to your mates in the pub, it is very readable for the student of history as it does go into enough detail while giving a understandable overview.

It's the book I read when I can't sleep, a long almost chronological story of people who had lived, did things, and left it to us.  It's humbling to know that we now exist in relative comfort after hundreds of generations struggle against famine, war and poverty that those people kept going against the odds and worked together so that we may have this futuristic present, which for all it's problems is probably the time I would most like to live.  It's a great time to be alive because so many people have created things we can now take from and make our own thereby creating our own things for the future.

This is a book to be reading for the rest of your life; always finding something new in it that you hadn't noticed before, being in awe of time and it's progression, and thinking on those lives.