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A Family History of Humanity
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 New York Times best-selling author of The Romanovs
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.
"Violence, treachery, and sex are the motors of history in this sweeping chronicle...Setting a whirlwind pace, Montefiore skillfully guides readers through the tumult with elegant prose and evocative character sketches. It's a bravura performance." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Award-winning historian Montefiore draws on 30 years of research, reading, and travel to create a panoramic, abundantly populated, richly detailed history of the world through the stories of families across place and time...A vibrant, masterful rendering of human history." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A staggering achievement. Simon Sebag Montefiore has given us a tremendous gift: a pulsingly readable world history through the millennia and from one end of the globe to the other." —Sir Simon Schama, author of The Story of the Jews
"One word for Montefiore's book: magisterial." —Ben Okri, Booker Prize–winning author of The Famished Road
"There is a certain satisfaction in holding, and reading a bulky tome. Simon Sebag Montefiore's The World: A Family History requires strong wrists, but is well worth the physical effort. It is a most readable and fascinating history of humanity from the perspective of that most enduring of institutions: the family. There is pleasure and learning on every [page]." ―Alexander McCall Smith, New Statesman, Books of the Year 2022
"A rollicking, globetrotting ... truly global history spanning almost every continent... . A thrilling tapestry. Only a highly skilled storyteller and pen-portraitist could so deftly grip attention across twenty-three 'acts', spanning more than six millennia and packed with lavish and pullulating detail... . The World is wildly entertaining ... certainly enriching and bracingly profane." ―Times Literary Supplement (UK)
"This history of the world, told through the stories of eminent families, is a riveting page-turner. The author brings his cast of dynastic titans, rogues and psychopaths to life with pithy, witty pen portraits, ladling on the sex and violence. An epic that both entertains and informs." —The Economist (UK), Best Books of 2022
"A magnificent new book by Montefiore... . [A] magisterial tome... . To make sense of the chaos of world history, [Montefiore] has done magnificently and meticulously by choosing as his framework all the dynasties we know of that ever held power or make a name for themselves... . Dip into this book anywhere and the minutiae of history leap off the page... . Dip too into the author's copious footnotes and there are gems to be mined... . [A] real-life Game of Thrones... . [A] compelling narrative, a massive effort of research... . Often sassy, always entertaining – of the first order... . To my mind, what it gives above all is perspective from which comes understanding and not a little wisdom." —The Daily Mail (UK), Book of the Week
"A history of the world from the Neanderthals to Trump. It's a rollicking tale, a kaleidoscope of savagery, sex, cruelty and chaos... . By focusing on family, Montefiore provides an intimacy usually lacking in global histories... . This book … has personality and a soul. It's also outrageously funny... . An enormously entertaining book." —The Times (UK), History Book of the Year
"Deserves to be a roaring bestseller... . Think Succession meets Game of Thrones, history told through dynasty and intrigue and written with wit, insight, and more than a dash of scandal." —The Spectator (UK)
This information about The World was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo © Hugo Burnand
Simon Sebag Montefiore was born in 1965 and read history at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge University, where he received his Doctorate of Philosophy (PhD).
Catherine the Great and Potemkin was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson, Duff Cooper, and Marsh Biography Prizes. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar won the History Book of the Year Prize at the British Book Awards. Young Stalin won the Costa Biography Award (UK), the LA Times Book Prize for Biography (US), Le Grand Prix de la Biographie Politique (France) and the Kreisky Prize for Political Literature (Austria). Jerusalem: The Biography won the Jewish Book of the Year Prize, from the Jewish Book Council (USA). Dr Montefiore's books are published in forty languages.
He is also the author of the novel, Sashenka. His new ...
... Full Biography
Link to Simon Sebag Montefiore's Website
Name Pronunciation
Simon Sebag Montefiore: SEE-bag mahn-tuh-FYOR-ay
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