![]() ![]() In ancient Persia and Rome, fathers routinely killed sons they perceived as threats. The Egyptians were fond of incestuous marriages and human sacrifice. As Montefiore notes, "Part-science, part-literature, part-mysticism, part-ethics, history has always been important because the past, whether gold-speckled splendour or heroic suffering, however imagined, possesses a legitimacy and an authenticity, even a sanctity, that is built into us." ![]() Is "The World" too much with us, indeed?įortunately, the sections are composed of chapters and sub-headed paragraphs that come together, mosaic-like, to illuminate who we are and why we behave as we do. He structures "The World" in 23 "acts" that span over 1,200 pages. Montefiore roams the globe, from the first green shoots of civilizations in east Asia to the European colonization of the Americas and Africa, displacing millions who had already carved out their own thriving societies. It's a towering work of imagination, somehow successful as it teeters beneath the awesome weight of names, dates and interpretations. ![]() "We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!" I recalled these lines as I powered through Simon Sebag Montefiore's "The World," an encyclopedic, unwieldy and yet mesmerizing survey of humanity as told through millennia of rulers and their blood-drenched empires. ![]() "The world is too much with us ," William Wordsworth lamented in a sonnet. ![]()
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