The Human Web: A Bird's-Eye View of World History

Rating:
Summary: What bird's eye?
Review: I love ambitious books, and today's world needs big perspectives. But this book is rooted more in current American values than in historical facts.
To give just a few examples: where else could the authors have found the wisdom that the first gardeners were women? or that farming could only take off after private property became the norm? The book is full of assumptions, and sometimes at the expense of the facts. Stating that Napoleon unified the French in the 1800-1810s, when France had been a centralized kingdom and European superpower for six centuries, is like saying that GWBush is the uniter of the Americans. To prove a point about exchanges speeding up, the book says that it in 1650, it would take a Dutch ship a year to go from Java to Amsterdam. But a famous dutch ship's journal relates of Bontekoe's adventurous journey there around 1620. Although plagued by tropical storms, losing his mast, losing his way, losing time to help other ships and the brandy on board catching on fire setting off a gunpowder explosion, he did Europe to Java in 10 months and came back in 9.
So I love the scope of this book but reading it is very disappointing. Jared Diamond or Marvin Harris are in a completely different league, culturally as well as scientifically.

Rating:
Summary: Great Overall View of History
Review: The Human Web is an excellent summary of human history. It is indeed a bird's eye view in that it looks at the broad overall sweep of human affairs and doesn't bog down in unnecessary detail. The major theme is the construction and expansion of human webs, or interconnections that tie cultures and civilizations together ever more tightly. If space voyagers ever arrived on Earth (and could read a human language) this book would be one of the first things I hope we hand them to help them understand us.

Rating:
Summary: A major work for general readers
Review: W.H. McNeill has written several of the top 20 works for specialists and general audience on general history. This work is a breathtaking overview of world history seen in the context of environment.

People who rightly were thrilled by Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" should go on and enjoy this rare treat: lucid and easy to understand, based on a wealth of erudition connected with plain sense, a new vision.

Young readers might get ideas about a change of courses. As a university professor I immediately took this book up as reading matter for my students - mostly engineers and lawyers at present.