Book description
An ambitious and highly entertaining novel of revisionist history from the author of the international bestseller HHhH, Laurent Binet's Civilizations is nothing less than a strangely believable counterfactual history of the modern world, fizzing with ideas about colonization, empire-building, and the eternal human quest for domination. It is an electrifying…
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Why read it?
1 author picked Civilizations as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
I'm not always crazy about alternate history as a genre, but this counterfactual look at the encounter between the Americas and "the Old World" was gripping, thought-provoking, and immersive. I'm a huge fan of Cervantes, El Greco, and Montaigne, and to see all three characters in this book, all of them thrown into a situation totally unlike what happened in Europe in the 1500s, yet all of them acting and reacting in ways that seem totally in character for them, was a great pleasure.
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