Author:Clive Ponting
Conventional accounts of world history tend to focus on the rise of Western civilisation and concentrate on the story of ancient Greece, the Roman empire and the expansion of Europe. The histories of the great civilisations of China, India and Japan, and therefore the experience of the majority of the world's people, have been relegated to a minor place. World History adopts a radically different approach. Starting from the assumption that the human story has to be seen in the round, it examines the evolution of humans, their lives as hunters and gatherers and their eventual adoption of agriculture, before looking at the emergence of civilisation across the globe; in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, the Indus Valley, Mesoamerica and Peru. It goes on to tell the story of the earliest empires, emphasising not just their differences but also their similarities. It explains how contacts were established between them and how technologies, ideas and the world's great religions travelled from one to another. It describes the great empires of Islam, of China and of the Mongols. Only towards the end of the story does Europe come slowly to dominate the world, against the background of technical innovations and social and economic change.
Pioneering...an impressive feat of scholarship. Clive Ponting has embraced a daunting task with commendable success.
—— Times Literary SupplementLarge, ambitious and often enthralling, it is a successful attempt to look at the unfolding of worlds history from an entirely new perspective...The joy and originality of this book is that Ponting offers us very little that is unfamiliar.
—— Literary ReviewFew single-volume efforts have covered so much ground in terms of sheer time-scale and territory, and the general reader will find plenty of useful reference material...Ponting is at his best on technology and the economy, and his description of Europe's waning influence since the 1940s makes perfect sense.
—— SpectatorThis is a history book with a difference. It is imaginative in its approach, courageous in its execution and expansive in its sweep of interest...His approach is radical and interesting...It is a fine example of how a radically new point of departure can cast light on a range of areas over which the specialists will continue to do battle long into the future.
—— Sunday Business PostWhat Preston does better than any other writer is to capture the human aspects of the frankly exciting race to create a nuclear weapon . . . This energetic book is a fine place to begin.
—— Chicago Sun-TimesHer skill is in weaving ethical struggles, scientific innovations and the grim dance of international relations into a riveting, coherent narrative.
—— ArenaHistorian Diana Preston has done a truly stupendous job in marshalling the facts and threading together the myriad storylines about the birth of the atomic age, from Marie Curie's discovery of radium to Nagasaki and beyond ... I particularly admire her ability to synthesise abstruse technical detail...in a way that makes it easy to understand. She has taken all this potentially arid science and given it a human force ... A complex, monumental tale I doubt will ever be better told.
—— Mail on SundayCompelling...Told with great skill by Diana Preston. There are personalities and discoveries, enterprises and adventures, colour and detail, and naturally there are moral dilemmas. But the lasting impression, implied in the subtitle and enhanced by the fluency of the tale, is of inevitability.
—— New StatesmanA concise and very readable overview of the human chain reaction that began in 1896 with the innocent observation that uranium salts could fog a photographic plate and culminated half a century later in the most potent weapon the world had ever seen.
—— Washington PostDeGroot tells the story of the American lunar mission with verve and elegance
—— Richard Aldous , Irish TimesFascinating, gossipy and occasionally hilarious
—— Jeffrey Taylor , Express
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