The World: A Family History Paperback – 1 Aug. 2023

I'm lost for words to adequately describe this work from Simon Seabag Montefiore. I wouldn't have the first clue as to how to even start such a mammoth task. The research alone is daunting, to say the least.This is brilliant. An eye-opener, it's interesting, it educates, it saddens the reader and delights the reader.It has taken ages for me to read and digest, but easily worth the effort. The World is magnificent.

The World: A Family History by Simon Sebag Montefiore is a very good book that tells the story of humanity from pre-historic times to the present day. It is a well-written and informative work that, through the medium of families and familiar relationships, chronicles the history of the world.The author, using this interesting approach, explores a wide range of events from across the entire globe and examine lives and stories that are perhaps less well-known to readers used to a more euro-centric view of history. As the book covers a vast breadth of time, a multitude of places and numerous incidents, it will, however, perhaps not be as detailed as some individuals may like - although for others, it may fire the imagination to discover more about a subject(s) that has caught their interest.Overall, a very good book.

There has never been a world history anything like this one. Partly because it's a truly global history that is as interested in places like Hawaii, Haiti and East Africa as Europe and America and partly because it is a history made up of individuals and families and their stories, rather than states, movements, trends or statistics. But what really makes it different is that it gives you world history with all the juice left in, unfiltered by scholarly primness. It brings to vivid, bloody, sexy, eccentric life hundreds of great historical figures from around the world by focusing on their human qualities: their passions and obsessions, their physical beauty or ugliness, their loves, hatreds, desires and addictions.While it's a very long book, it doesn't actually feel like that when you're reading it because it's organised in tight, fast-moving short chapters, because your attention is taken all around the world and because the familiar characters - the Atillas, Caesars, Cromwells, Bismarcks, Michaelangelos and Roosevelts, are mixed up with less familiar, equally fascinating figures from China, Africa and the Arab world. It's a history buff's delight.

The human race is not very nice at all. Simon has written a massive book on the history of the world, its a sort of horrible histories for adults. We are a nasty, horrid, murdering, blood thirsty race only interested in land acquisition and power and rape of the lands and people for financial gain and nothing will stand in our way. Nepotism, Machiavellian, despots, dictators, kings and queens, servants and slaves and revolutionaries . And as for the women, blimey ! Its all there and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and learnt so much, history lessons at school were never this interesting or fun if you can call it fun. (there is wry humour in it) The sort of book to read while cringing and saying urgh quite a lot and it's sad to say the human race still has much to learn from the past. Thank you Simon its a wonderful book well researched and as always you write so well, I'll be buying more copies to give as gifts but I'm glad to say my copy was on kindle which I think was much more manageable. So what next Simon? how do you top that?

A superbly organized, energetic, humane, gripping chronicle of the human race ... No enquiring mind can afford to do without this book. Sebag Montefiore shows off his best talent : blending human virtues and evils together in a stormy, addictive painting. The product of a generous and humane sensibility, this timeless account makes intelligible the full span of human history through the families that moved the world. He paints a colourful picture of wars and conquests; of grand visions, of the advances and limitations of rulers; of remarkable people and mostly remarkable families. This is a text dominated not by dates and facts, but by the sweep of mankind’s experience across the centuries, a guide to humanity’s achievements and an acute witness to its frailties. Sebag Montefiore takes us through the psychology of the great rulers with both meticulous intimacy and grand theatrical sensibility. He sketches personalities so vividly that it is very difficult to let go of his writing.I would recommend not having anything important to do while reading this book. It is highly addictive.

You have to admire SSM. One wonders when he finds time to sleep with his literary and media endeavours. Undoubtedly, he is a refreshing historian who eschews superfluous academic detail and his prose is rarely turgid. Unfortunately, however, it is all too often disjointed and could really do with proper editorial control. It is well known that the more successful writers become the less tolerant they are of editors and, as in his Jerusalem, it really shows here. I am about a quarter way in and finding it rather hard going. Quite apart from the attempts to maintain chronological order - worthy but unsettling when a story is stopped so as to jump to another story elsewhere in the world - the huge list of characters makes it very hard to follow. Another problem is the considerable number of non-sequiturs, occasioned I suspect by wholesale extraction of paragraphs to reduce the size of the volume. The stories themselves, moreover, are frequently presented as lists of facts which makes for a fairly indigestible mix. This is not to dismiss the sheer magnitude of his effort and the scholarship involved. However, I wish it could have been more reader-friendly.