Since I have a book-buying problem, I decided to start collecting certain kinds of books in order to avoid overbuying. Since I love kids' books so much, I figured I should start with all the Newbery Medal winners. (The Newbery Medal is given to the book with the "most distinguished contribution to American literature for children" by the American Library Association.) They've been giving this award since 1921, so I thought that would keep my book allowance occupied for 80-90 books... seems safe, right? So far, it's working, because this book is the very first ever Newbery Medal winner, and it was HUGE. So, some background.
The Story of Mankind was written in 1921 by some professor who wanted to make the entire history of the world available for kids to read. So he wrote it. That's a pretty large undertaking, but admirable. The author literally starts with the primordial ooze and works his way up through the time of publication. That's where it starts to get weird, but we'll go into that later. He does present an evolutionist perspective on "where it all came from", but he doesn't completely ignore major events described in the Bible like every other historian does. On the contrary, his approach to picking and choosing events was to describe those events that had a direct impact on our current "western" civilisation. So there's a lot of Greece, Rome, Europe stuff in there, but not a lot of Japan. He mentions Moses leading the Jews in the Exodus, the birth of Jesus, and the "birth" of Mohammed because these events later lead to many of the conflicts of the world. (I was skeptical about this guy's viewpoint- primordial ooze?- until I saw that he has also written The Story of the Bible, which I will likely check out someday.) But all in all, it's a pretty thorough summary- if 600 pages is a summary- of Western Civilisation. It's written in very easy language for kids to understand, and occasionally he threw in a semi-editorial comment that I found funny to read- especially considering it came from a 1921 perspective. For example, "Constantine, sometimes (Heaven knows why) called Constantine the Great..." I find that funny. Towards the end of the original book, he did make a note that he was brought up to be somewhat of a snob, and that affected his view on the world- why he spoke about Bach fugues and not about "midwestern prairie hymns." Well, well. :)
Here's where the book runs into a problem. This guy had about 5,000 years of recorded history to write, so he did it. It was pretty great. But he felt the need to record events that happened leading right up to his death, which meant there was a pretty editorial and fairly detailed description of World War I in there... of course, describing the hope that it was the war to end all wars, etc etc. Consequently, we have something like the Hundred Years War that gets about, oh, a paragraph of coverage. Then WWI comes along with a couple chapters describing events leading to it, his opinion on the leaders, a major battle here and there, etc etc... sort of skewed. And it gets worse- people thought this was such a great book that a few years after its publication they "updated" it to describe more events of "our time." These updates happened in 1954 and 1972. More long and detailed descriptions of the depression, WWII, the "modern communication era", Woodstock (?!), with some "meanwhile, over in Europe"... and the worst update is the last one- some goon thought an update from 1972 to 1999 would be pertinent. This is a very, very dreary listing of a summary of the events of every newsmaking country over the past 20 years. Here's South Africa, here's what happened in Iran, France did this, Vietnam, Korea, and my goodness, let's mention all the American Presidents and what we thought of their contribution. Yikes. I barely made it through the last hundred pages or so.
But really, all in all, it's a good book. I mean, where are you going to find Moses, Metternich, Michelangelo, and Mussolini in the same book? Well... right here. I do wish the original author had stopped at about 1900, and there were no updates. But it's really interesting to see the history of the world in such a tiny little volume, because it really helps to make clear some of those events and dates that in the past were just an event or date in my mind. (Oh, and I get a lot more questions on Jeopardy! right now.) But I still call it a very good book, and worth reading. At one point the author says, "Why should we ever read fairy stories, when the truth of history is so much more interesting and entertaining?" That's an excellent bit of literary snobbery there, but in this case, I'll give it to him. This is a very interesting book.
My favorite part, FYI, is this paragraph, describing the fall of the Roman Empire. I'll let you figure out why it was my favorite part:
"The text-books of ancient history give the date 476 as the year in which Rome fell, because in that year last emperor was driven off his throne. But Rome, which was not built in a day, took a long time falling. The process was so slow and so gradual that most Romans did not realise how their old world was coming to an end. They complained about the unrest of the time- they grumbled about the high prices of food and about the low wages of the workmen- they cursed the profiteers who had a monopoly of the grain and the wool and the gold coin. Occasionally they rebelled against an unusually rapacious governor. But the majority of the people during the first four centuries of our era ate and drank (whatever their purse allowed them to by) and hated or loved (according to their nature) and went to the theatre (whenever there was a free show of fighting gladiators) or starved in the slums of the big cities, utterly ignorant of the fact that their empire had outlived its usefulness and was doomed to perish."
AWESOME.
No comments:
Post a Comment