Here are 100 books that This Fleeting World fans have personally recommended if you like
This Fleeting World.
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I’m a historian who wants to understand the big picture as best I can. And while occasionally I can clear my schedule enough to read a 1,000pp book, realistically that won’t happen often so I am always on the alert for short books that aim to provide what I am looking for: a coherent vision of the whole of human history. That’s asking a lot of an author, but these five do it well.
This one is 359 pages and says almost nothing about the 20th century. It is quirky in terms of what it includes and what it leaves out, but reliable in its facts and judgments, and full of insights I haven’t encountered elsewhere. It does not bother with grand theories or overarching narrative, but focuses on what the author finds interesting. Cook is a specialist on the history of Islam, which gives the book an uncommon vantage point.
Why has human history been crowded into the last few thousand years? Why has it happened at all? Could it have happened in a radically different way? What should we make of the disproportionate role of the West in shaping the world we currently live in? This witty, intelligent hopscotch through human history addresses these questions and more. Michael Cook sifts the human career on earth for the most telling nuggets and then uses them to elucidate the whole. From the calendars of Mesoamerica and the temple courtesans of medieval India to the intricacies of marriage among an aboriginal Australian…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I’m a historian who wants to understand the big picture as best I can. And while occasionally I can clear my schedule enough to read a 1,000pp book, realistically that won’t happen often so I am always on the alert for short books that aim to provide what I am looking for: a coherent vision of the whole of human history. That’s asking a lot of an author, but these five do it well.
This one is a polar opposite of Cook’s, in that it has a strong chronological structure to it and presents the story in five chapters, each devoted to a segment of time. It is the only world history that is really strong on gender, family, marriage, and women. But it also tackles the more traditional subjects for historians. A strength that it shares with Cook’s and Manning’s books is attention to the history of social inequality, a subject that more and more historians have taken up. At 376 pages, this one is not the briefest on my list.
This book tells the story of humankind as producers and reproducers from the Paleolithic to the present. Renowned social and cultural historian Merry Wiesner-Hanks brings a new perspective to world history by examining social and cultural developments across the globe, including families and kin groups, social and gender hierarchies, sexuality, race and ethnicity, labor, religion, consumption, and material culture. She examines how these structures and activities changed over time through local processes and interactions with other cultures, highlighting key developments that defined particular eras such as the growth of cities or the creation of a global trading network. Incorporating foragers,…
I’m a historian who wants to understand the big picture as best I can. And while occasionally I can clear my schedule enough to read a 1,000pp book, realistically that won’t happen often so I am always on the alert for short books that aim to provide what I am looking for: a coherent vision of the whole of human history. That’s asking a lot of an author, but these five do it well.
In 256 pages Manning tells you about what he calls the “human system.” Nearly half the book is dedicated to the Paleolithic, before farming, cities, and writing, a very unusual feature. Manning is trained as a historian of Africa, and that shines through at many points. He pays lots of attention to migration, languages, and labor history. Unlike most historians, he considers evidence from archeology, linguistics, and genetics as well as written sources. The only drawback to this one is that it is not written in the most accessible or entertaining prose.
Humanity today functions as a gigantic, world-encompassing system. Renowned world historian, Patrick Manning traces how this human system evolved from Homo Sapiens' beginnings over 200,000 years ago right up to the present day. He focuses on three great shifts in the scale of social organization - the rise of syntactical language, of agricultural society, and today's newly global social discourse - and links processes of social evolution to the dynamics of biological and cultural evolution. Throughout each of these shifts, migration and social diversity have been central, and social institutions have existed in a delicate balance, serving not just their…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I’m a historian who wants to understand the big picture as best I can. And while occasionally I can clear my schedule enough to read a 1,000pp book, realistically that won’t happen often so I am always on the alert for short books that aim to provide what I am looking for: a coherent vision of the whole of human history. That’s asking a lot of an author, but these five do it well.
This one squeezes a lot into 248 reader-friendly pages. It combines the Big History approach with the emphasis on connections that world historians typically admire. But it is mainly a human history: by page 38 humans are emerging, and from that point on the evolution of the Universe and life on earth are in the rear-view mirror. Also very readable.
Big History tells the story of the universe, from the beginning to now, by interweaving the fields of biology, geology and anthropology to offer an all-encompassing account of Earth's history. Flowing seamlessly from the birth of the universe to life on a planet inhabited by billions of people, this is a mind altering account of the fate of the Earth and of our role in this ongoing story. Featuring Cynthia Stokes Brown's paradigm-shifting movement, Big History is a seminal work written for academics, students and the layperson alike.
I’m a science researcher and writer living in London. My research field is astrobiology and the possibility of life on other planets – it brings together lots of different areas of science with engineering and space exploration and so is deeply ‘interdisciplinary’. And as a science writer, I try to bring this same broad perspective and unifying approach to other profound questions. My fascination with understanding our own origins was sparked by my childhood growing up in East Africa, the cradle of humanity. In Origins I explored different ways that planet Earth has influenced our human story across the millennia - it’s an example of ‘Big History’.
Few thinkers have done more to advance and popularize the discipline of Big History in recent years than David Christian. He coined the term and has worked with Bill Gates to deliver Big History teaching to high school students around the world. The book I’ve picked out here is a little more academic and detailed than the others, and provides a really solid overview of this approach to integrating large-scale history from the Big Bang to the present.
An introduction to a new way of looking at history, from a perspective that stretches from the beginning of time to the present day, "Maps of Time" is world history on an unprecedented scale. Beginning with the Big Bang, David Christian views the interaction of the natural world with the more recent arrivals in flora and fauna, including human beings. Cosmology, geology, archeology, and population and environmental studies - all figure in David Christian's account, which is an ambitious overview of the emerging field of 'Big History.' "Maps of Time" opens with the origins of the universe, the stars and…
Michael Corballis is a psychologist and brain scientist. His interests lie in how the mind works, how it maps onto the brain, and how it evolved. Much of his work is published in books and scientific articles, but he has also written books aimed at a general readership. These include Pieces of Mind, The Lopsided Ape,The Recursive Mind, The Wandering Mind, and The Truth about Language.
Much of what we do and think comes from imagination, generated by our minds rather than by the physical world. This includes art, literature, music, religion, even science. Our dreams are spontaneous acts of creativity, and even memory itself can be distorted by the restless mind. Fernandez-Armesto argues that many animals have better memories than we do, because the human system produces spontaneously creative thoughts at the expense of fidelity. That’s why memories are often false. The author is a historian with an interest in how the mind works, and his book is an amazingly comprehensive history of the human imagination.
To imagine-to see what is not there-is the startling ability that has fueled human development and innovation through the centuries. As a species we stand alone in our remarkable capacity to refashion the world after the picture in our minds.
Traversing the realms of science, politics, religion, culture, philosophy and history, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto reveals the thrilling and disquieting tales of our imaginative leaps-from the first Homo sapiens to the present day. Through groundbreaking insights in cognitive science, Fernandez-Armesto explores how and why we have ideas in the first place, providing a tantalizing glimpse into who we are and what we…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
When I learned science's story of the universe–that it began as a primordial plasma that transformed itself into stars, galaxies and a living planet that then transmogrified into plants and animals and consciousness–when I learned the details of how the universe began as small as an acorn and then magically transformed that acorn of elementary particles into two trillion galaxies, I was beset with one, piercing, lifelong question: WHY ISN'T EVERYONE WAKING UP EACH MORNING STUNNED OUT OF THEIR MINDS? My entire professional life has been an effort to draw others into this amazement, into life as an ongoing celebration.
In his book, Wolfgang Leidhold examines the entire journey of humanity and discovers something truly amazing: even though the human brain has not changed in structure during the 300,000 years of the existence of Homo sapiens, a series of mental powers have been evoked through our conscious participation. He shows us how humans became involved in building human mentality, going through eight such transitions, including the evocation of self-reflexive consciousness, inner transcendence, and the reproductive imagination.
The great gift of this book is the conviction it awakens that the development of human consciousness is not over and that those of us alive today can become involved in what he calls "the next turn in human experience."
In a wide arc from the Paleolithic to the present day, this book explores the changing structure of human experience and its impact on the dynamics of cultures, civilizations, and political ideas.
The main thesis is a paradigm shift: the structure of human experience is not a universal constant but changes over time. Looking at the entire range of human history, there are a total of nine transformations, beginning with conscious perception and imagination in the Paleolithic and ending, for the time being, in modern times with the discovery of the unconscious. In between, this book explores six more transformations…
In 2009, when I decided to set a crime series in Iceland, I embarked on a decade of research into the country, its people, its literature, its culture, and its elves. I visited the country, I spoke to its inhabitants and I read books, lots of books – I couldn’t find an elf, but I was told where they live. I needed to understand its criminals, its victims, its police, and most of all my detective Magnus Jonson. These are the best books that helped me get to grips with Iceland.
To understand a country, you need to understand its history. This book is the most accessible account of Iceland’s history and is also very funny. I wish it had been written ten years ago when I started out on my Iceland odyssey. Egill covers the whole of Iceland’s history from Ingólfur throwing his home pillars into the sea in 874 to decide where he should land, to the great women’s strike of 1975 when 90 percent of Icelandic women stopped doing what they were expected to do and the country came to a stop. Also includes my favourite bit of Icelandic history. On 9 May 1940 Hitler invaded Belgium and Holland and that same day Britain invaded Iceland, an action so mildly embarrassing that we never really talk about it. Egill does, though.
"[A] joyously peculiar book." -- The New York Times
‘Bjarnason’s intriguing book might be about a cold place, but it’s tailor-made to be read on the beach.’ –New Statesman
The untold story of how one tiny island in the middle of the Atlantic has shaped the world for centuries.
The history of Iceland began 1,200 years ago, when a frustrated Viking captain and his useless navigator ran aground in the middle of the North Atlantic. Suddenly, the island was no longer just a layover for the Arctic tern. Instead, it became a nation whose diplomats and musicians, sailors and soldiers,…
I grew up in the 1950s and loved getting the bejeezus scared out of me by monster movies my brother and I watched at a local theater or on TV. With a budding interest in writing, I began noting down monsters and scenes that caught my attention. In fact, it was from the TV series The Outer Limits, an episode entitled Zanti Misfits, that I later got the idea for the creatures in my book. I am currently reading books on the strange pelagic creatures that live at extreme ocean depths for a monster story with a nautical theme. I hope you find the books on my list as enjoyable and informative as I did.
I am a firm believer that the more information you assimilate, the more you know and the better writer you can be. I found this book refreshing and informative, with detailed insights into what we know about the universe, the Earth, through the evolution of humankind, and our social history up to more modern times.
No matter what your preferred genre is or what worlds you create, Big History is a foundation on which you can build any story, including Sci-fi, like my book.
Big History: Between Nothing and Everything surveys the past not just of humanity, or even of planet Earth, but of the entire universe. In reading this book instructors and students will retrace a voyage that began 13.7 billion years ago with the Big Bang and the appearance of the universe. Big history incorporates findings from cosmology, earth and life sciences, and human history, and assembles them into a single, universal historical narrative of our universe and of our place within it.
The first edition of Big History: Between Nothing and Everything, is written by the pioneers of the field, and…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I’m a historian who loves watching the Founding Fathers do not-so-Founding-Fatherish things, like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson bonding over how awful Alexander Hamilton was, James Madison reporting how the king of Spain liked to relieve himself daily by the same oak tree, and George Washington losing his temper, asking his cousin to look for the teeth he just knew he’d left in his desk drawer, or spinning out a conspiracy theory. It’s details like this that reveal that even the most revealed figures were real people, like us but often very different. Figuring out how it all makes sense is a challenge I enjoy.
A classic statement of the mentality of the men who fought the American Revolution, A Revolutionary People at War documents how the enthusiasm of the war’s early days, the “rage militaire” in Royster’s memorable phrase, waxed and waned during the brutal conflict as soldiers and civilians settled into an uneasy relationship often in danger of collapsing into anarchy or a military despotism as everyone feared. Royster seems to have read every scrap a soldier or officer produced across the war’s 8 years, and researching the book in the 1970s, he someone kept track of everything, deploying a deft quote time after time, without the aid of a computer. How?
In this highly acclaimed book, Charles Royster explores the mental processes and emotional crises that Americans faced in their first national war. He ranges imaginatively outside the traditional techniques of analytical historical exposition to build his portrait of how individuals and a populace at large faced the Revolution and its implications. The book was originally published by UNC Press in 1980.
