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The World

A Family History of Humanity

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The World

Auteur(s): Simon Sebag Montefiore
Narrateur(s): Simon Sebag Montefiore, Full Cast
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À propos de cet audio

 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. Monde Redevances Iran Empire ottoman Guerre Impérialisme Moyen Âge Mariage New York Militaire Moyen-Orient Chine Afrique Histoire ancienne Pirate Caraïbes Arabie Saoudite
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The book’s breadth and depth show that Sebag Montefiore put in a great effort. It is difficult to create a crash course that simplifies and yet interconnects many of the modern world’s relevant developments from political, socioeconomic, cultural and technological perspectives.

Even so, some things invariably have to be left out. Perhaps, one such casualty is the inter-black violence that plagued South Africa during the transition from white to native rule. With the exception of Ghana, too little attention is paid to West Africa. Still, this book reads well if one overcomes the frequent change in narrators.

Great book!

Impressive

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One of the basic tenets of communication is to remain consistent with your message and oresentation. You want your audience to remain within the narrative and the story. you do not want to break the fourth wall. Although the work is excellent, the decision to use multiple narrators and changing with each chapter makes it difficult to follow.

Most audio books will either use one narrator or if they decide to have a larger cast, will devote a large section of the book to one narrator and then alternate. However, with alternating narrators occurring every 5 to 10 minutes, one loses the cadence of the narration. It also takes time, (and I understand that the focus is to include people that represent the vast scope of History both geologic and cultural) to adapt to the various intonations, accents, and cadence of the narrator. if they were given the opportunity to read multiple chapters, it would have been much easier to follow the flow and the story.

Unfortunately, some of the narrators mispronounced words. some read in a staccato-like fashion that again made it difficult to understand the text. Others narrated beautifully and expressively in a manner that brought you into the story; they we're not fighting with the text as some other narrators seem to have had.

That being said, it is an outstanding work but one that I think I would have rather read as opposed to listened given the level of frustration I experienced based on the decision of the producers of this audiobook.

Chapter-rotating narrators a distraction

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After almost 70 hours of listening, there is a lot to say about this book, but I will try to keep it somewhat brief.


First off, the book is a monumental achievement with so much information that no one person could retain a lot of it. For Montefiore to have put this all together is really a great accomplishment and it is a awesome reference to own in any format.


That said, it is not beyond criticism and I think the negative aspects are as follows:


The narration is terrible. Plain and simple. I get they were trying to have diversity of voices to suit the subject matter, but the inconsistency makes it very hard to listen to. Narrators routinely change pronunciation between chapters so it is hard to follow that they are speaking of the same person / place. One narrator strangely does the voices of the character (notably Chinggis Khan). The fact they rotate each short chapter is just too confusing and disjointing.
The style of jumping between notable persons during each era, can make it hard to follow. As in they will speak about the birth of Stalin and then not mention him for another 2 hours when he will did something else of note. So there is never a direct story about a single person’s life.


That said there is much to like with this one:


The amount of information here is crazy and really cannot be beat.
The insights about people’s motivations and actions when in power is really significant.
The perspective of how people (especially men) behave when in absolute power shows why leaders need to be constrained.
Putting together the achievements and brutal behaviour of humans next to each other is sobering but necessary.


Overall, I do recommend this book as long as you know what you are getting into. The positives outweigh the negatives and after so many hours you get used to the narration issues.

great info, bad narration

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