A History of the World

By: Andrew Marr

Narrated by: Andrew Marr, David Timson

Fresh, exciting and vividly readable, this is popular history at its very best.

Our understanding of world history is changing, as new discoveries are made on all the continents and old prejudices are being challenged. In this truly global journey, political journalist Andrew Marr revisits some of the traditional epic stories, from classical Greece and Rome to the rise of Napoleon, but surrounds them with less familiar material, from Peru to the Ukraine, China to the Caribbean. He looks at cultures that have failed and vanished, as well as the origins of today’s superpowers, and finds surprising echoes and parallels across vast distances and epochs.

A History of the World is a book about the great change-makers of history and their times, people such as Cleopatra, Genghis Khan, Galileo and Mao, but it is also a book about us. For ‘the better we understand how rulers lose touch with reality, or why revolutions produce dictators more often than they produce happiness, or why some parts of the world are richer than others, the easier it is to understand our own times.’

©2012 Andrew Marr (P)2012 Macmillan Digital Audio

AMAZING OVERVIEW

If you are interested in history don’t miss listening to this book. I have been a student of history since my mid-teens (I now am 83yrs. young). This book is an amazing compilation of history. For those who are not familiar with world history, but are interested,it is a good place to start. Good references to different books. As for me, as always, I learned something new and am sorry that I finished the book. My thanks to the author and narrator Mr. Andrew Marr and my thanks to Audible for making this book available, JK

Excellent Overview for a wide audience

Andrew Marra condensed version of his documentary series is concise, well balanced and centrist in its presentation. He is very clear in the introduction about the approach taken so that readers looking for an extremely feminist, Marxist or third world perspective on history will not be disappointed. That being said, Marr does indeed try to be more inclusive in his overview of history than many past authors have been. This is a useful resource for honors high school courses, as part of university curriculum or for the average intelligent person out there who wants to understand the flow of history and the consequences of key developments , changes, personalities and events.

Comprehensive but not easy to consume via audio book

This book was great and filling the many gaps in my understanding of world history. I can thoroughly recommend it. However, the narrative was long and hard to stay focused. There are many instances where the author keeps referring back to concepts as it by which time the listener has lost track of what he is referring to. Even many rewinds and relistens later, I still could not figure out what concepts he was referring to with such liberal use of impersonal pronouns.

Excellent introduction

Marr's book is a quick and informative introduction to the subject, with some blind spots. To mention the blind spots first: it is, as many such books are, heavily Western and Eurocentric in outlook. China and India are mentioned early on, in the roundup of the earliest civilizations, but then mostly drop out of the picture until they once again begin to impinge on Western sensibilities. Not much here either about the growth of the major world religions; the conflict between Christianity and Islam gets especially short shrift. The entire history of the Crusades is reduced to a couple of sentences; if you blink, you'll miss it. Marr spends far more time talking about the tulip mania that swept Holland in the early years of capitalism.

But what he does cover, Marr covers well, with plenty of anecdotes and surprising connections along the way. His coverage of Africa, like his coverage of India and China, mostly focuses on the interaction of Africa and Europe, but the story he tells about that interaction is electrifying (and horrifying). And he asks the big questions, such as the one I've always wondered about and which is seldom addressed so explicitly: granted that the life of hunter-gatherers was full of novelty and free time, and the life of farmers was filled with backbreaking, tedious labor, why did the human race opt for farming? (Marr makes the case that the farming came first, and then the increase in population, rather than farming being devised as a way to support an already increasing number of people.)

Marr is an unabashed proponent of the "great person" school of writing history. There's plenty of material here about Alexander the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Margaret Sanger, and Mao Zedong and the infamous Jiang Qing. He also weaves a discussion of technology into the narrative, including the technologies of war and medicine. His goal throughout is not to throw a bunch of names and dates at the listener, but to give a sense of individual personalities and the gradual unfolding of the larger story.

First-rate narration by David Timson.

Massive educational/time commitment but worth it!

If you could sum up A History of the World in three words, what would they be?

This is an excellently written and performed, lengthy audio-world-history book that kept my attention so well, I often fell asleep at night with it playing on my smartphone. As a guy who never enjoyed (world or US) history, I learned a tremendous amount from this well organized work. My coworkers joke that everyday I come into the office with a new 'factoid' about world history that startles and provokes their curiosity in much the same way it has mine.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

This book is heavy - every single orated sentence is a new learning point of world history. It took me a month (between other commitments) to complete this ... dare I say the War and Peace of world history audio books?