Customer Reviews

Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present

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It's hard not to admire what Ms. Brown has tried to do with this book, Big History. In essence, as the subtitle to the book implies, she has tried to cover the history of the world starting with the big bang and working up through the present. By doing so, she attempts to provide a unity that is often missing from works of history, paying respect to the work done in the world of science and giving us a true "big picture."

In many ways, Ms. Brown succeeds with her work. Most importantly, she opens our eyes to ideas that are often left out of typical histories. She is very cognizant of what is left to answer in her field, finishing each chapter with a section of "unanswered questions" that are quite thought-provoking and may be the best part of this work.

On the other hand, this book can be little more than the broadest of overviews of historical trends. Coming in at 248 pages, one can't really expect much more considering the ground that she's trying to cover. This is not necessarily a bad thing but I have wed widely in certain areas that she discusses; in particular, as a science teacher, I'm well-versed in those subjects that touch mine: big bang theory, scientific/industrial revolution, etc. I've even read a number of the books she notes and I couldn't help but notice what's been left out of her discussion. The loss of detail in pursuit of the big picture is always a problem in books like this.

Still, it is a succinct and compelling volume in many ways. Ms. Brown is clearly familiar with the latest research and lays out her global vision well. For beginners in history, this would be an excellent place to start. And it's not bad for the rest of us either.

If the world began thirteen years ago, modern industrial societies would have only existed for six seconds, says "Big History: From The Big Bang to The Present". The universe is 13.7 billion years old and "Big History: From the Big Bang to The Present" attempts to cover it all in a book that is as artistic as a novel while reducing humankind to the small spec that it is- while still granting it some dignity in an act of grand balance. Author and Professor Cynthia Stokes Brown combines so many elements and makes simply a delightful book in "Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present" and as such it has our highest recommendation for anyone with an interest of history on the wider scale or just history in general.

Brown's clear, orderly and concise history of mankind is indeed a joy to read. It traces human development in a systamatic and logical manner, omitting unimportant episodes to allow anyone to quickly and correctly understand the development of our world.

In her preface, Brown acknowledges that histories usually begin with the appearance of written records. Her ambition is greater than that as she extends history "to the limits of what is currently knowable by scientific methods, using whatever data and evidence are available, and not limited to written documents." (p. xi) More than a quarter of this small book (29% to be precise) is devoted to the development of the universe from the Big Bang to the emergence of life on our planet and eventually to the appearance of Homo sapiens. The first part of the book goes from 13.7 billion years ago through 10,000 years ago. Her presentation of the story as learned from science will be eye-opening for many people who have not kept up with popular science.

When she turns to history proper, her story is not very different from J.R. McNeill and William H. McNeill in their book The Human Web. Instead of the "Old World Web," she speaks of the "Afro-Eurasian Network." She agrees with their emphasis on the role of Columbus in bringing the networks of the world into a unified global network. But she places greater emphasis on the Mongols in the period before Columbus, seeing their role in world history as comparable to Columbus as they brought tighter linkages to the Afro-Eurasian Network. She too sees the emergence of industrialization as a key feature leading to capitalism and today's global world of communications and economics. While the McNeill's highlight the economic boom in the world since 1945, Brown points to the upsurge in standards of living that began in England and Holland in the 1600s and has not been reversed as had often happened up to that time. She questions whether industrial society without colonies can continue to prosper without a setback in living standards.

Readers who are interested in the Bible will find some new twists in Brown's reflections on the hunter-gatherer life that predated the development of agriculture and domestication of animals. Twice she points to the rising of the Mediterranean Sea that resulted, around 5600 BCE, in the sudden overflowing that created the Bosphorus Strait and the Black Sea. (pp. 66 & 93) She suggests that the flood stories in the Old Testament and throughout the Middle East may have sprung from that event, even though she admits this is only speculation. She also throws new meanings on the Epic of Gilgamesh and the story of Adam and Eve as she reflects on the life of hunter-gatherers. She sees those stories as reflecting a conflict over the loss of the leisure and ease of the hunting and gathering life compared to the labor and human concentration that came with agriculture. ( See pp. 90-93)

This book is highly concentrated yet filled with observations that will stimulate further inquiry into areas that are only briefly covered. This is an excellent book that needs to be read by anyone wanting a framework for understanding the past of our universe, the development of human civilization, and the peril that industrialization and overpopulation pose for our present and future.

I heard her speak at Black Oak Books in Berkeley before they closed their doors for good - a sad event, indeed!

This is a wonderful book, and I would highly recommend it!

...that, in addition to it, for those looking for a broad framework to understand the past, I would recommend to read the following works, whose scope is amazingly global: 1. Agrarian cultures: "Pre-industrial societies" by Patricia Crone; 2. Economy. "Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium" by Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O'Rourke; 3. Government: "The History of Government" by S.E. Finer; 4. Ideas: "Ideas, a History from Fire to Freud", by Peter Watson; 5. Religion: "The Phenomenon of Religion: A Thematic Approach" by Moojan Momen; and 6. War: "War in Human Civilization" by Azar Gat.

This enjoyable and informative book can be recommended to everyone wanting a concise, modern, broad history of the human race with particular focus on its context within the history of the universe and the earth. The author is experienced in this approach to world history and has achieved an easily accessible book based on academic research and recent non-academic books in the area. It is a pleasure to read. However, the pretence of newness of "Big History" as a field strikes me as questionable.

A first reading of the Preface leaves one sceptical. It asserts that the book offers a uniquely seamless multi-disciplinary narrative, as opposed to world histories where "universe and planetary history" are only "tacked on". However, covering so much material "seamlessly" in 288 pages is simply impossible. The meaning of multi-disciplinary is not specified, and some fundamental movements, such as the Enlightenment, are not covered at all. The book does devote much space to the context of planetary and universal history, and is seamless in the sense that it covers that which is known from science and that which is known as history in one narrative. Brown describes "Big History" as "still a tiny subfield" of the field of world history, that has no journal "yet" and whose pioneering work started in 1989, i.e., she implies that it is new.

According to the Wikipedia entry: "Big History looks at the past on all time scales, from the Big Bang to modernity, seeking out common themes and patterns. It uses a multi-disciplinary approach from the latest findings, such as biology, astronomy, geology, climatology, prehistory, archeology, anthropology, cosmology, natural history, and population and environmental studies. Big History arose from a desire to go beyond the specialized and self-contained fields that emerged in the 20th century and grasp history as a whole, looking for common themes across the entire time scale of history. Conventionally, the study of history is typically limited to the written word and the systematic narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; yet this only encompasses the past 5,000 years or so and leaves out the vast majority of history and all events in time, in relation to humanity."

The idea of Big History as described above is utterly laudable, but is it really new? Although Brown's book has a considerable bibliography, it does not refer to one of the older yet most popular books in the field of world history, namely, J. M. Roberts "History of the World", first published in America in 1976 (5th Edition, 2007). Could it be that the "Big Historians" are unaware of Roberts' work? Roberts begins with the typical explanation of the proportions of history (comparing centuries to minutes), emphasizes the importance of the historical "baggage" that homo sapiens inherited, and covers history from the evolution of primates to the present. He focuses on civilisation, but he does give the big picture. Roberts' text is a weighty, modern classic of over 1100 pages, with broad and deep coverage, compared to Brown's 248 pages plus notes and index. It is a good thing to cover history from the beginning of time to the end of time, and it is a good thing to broaden the disciplines in order to explain the context of humanity. Nonetheless, it would be silly to exclude work such as Roberts' simply because Chapter One does not mention the three billion year reign of bacteria. Perhaps other such histories were written before Roberts.

Here are some strong points or interesting aspects of Brown's book:
On the first page, the author points out that the modern concept of the origin of the universe is now so strongly verified that it constitutes "a creation story for our time." The book is symmetrical in the sense that it ends with the likely end scenarios of the planetary system and the Universe. Three main scenarios are given for the future of humanity: one is optimistic regarding cooperation for population growth and resource management, one predicts a massive culling, and one is the middle scenario. Unfortunately, the culling scenario comes off as most likely. The author concludes that, for our ever abiding Earth, any scenario is quite acceptable.

Brown points out that world history has traditionally been summarized as the "ascent of man", but after writing the book she found that world history is really about the "increase of people". Throughout the book, the reader sees how population increase is accompanied by massive destruction of resources through deforestation, elimination of species, emptying water sources and poisoning the environment. One can only agree with the author's stance that Homo Sapien dabbling with nuclear energy has been a failure and has created problems for countless generations.

The book has a particularly good coverage of slavery and racism, one of the academic strengths of the author. Unfortunately, slavery in its many guises continues to enjoy strong acceptance in all parts of the world, whether as grossly abused and/or underpaid domestic helpers, prositutes, foreign labourers or factory workers.

The conciseness of "Big History" allows the reader to keep an overview. For example, it allows the reader to see that China has usually been rich and powerful in the last two millennia, where the last centuries were an exception. Each chapter includes a short discussion of unanswered questions. These are fascinating and informative. The author particularly likes to point out the many questions whose answer "no one knows".

On first reading, the many personal details in the Preface did not seem to promise a serious approach to the topic, but the book is well done.

I love this book. It illustrates how small the earth and the species we call homo sapiens really is. We are a very recent and very small form of live, yet dynamic, ever-changing, and deeply interconnected with everything else in this vast universe. Reading this book was a spiritual journey.

Several writers have covered the longest history we can imagine, from Big Bang to now and beyond. This brief one is a quick and pleasant read. Ms Brown acknowledges that she follows in the path of David Christian [Maps of Time]; she writes clearly and with restrained passion about humanity's impact on the environment. I read this parallel to listening to a Teaching Company course [Big History] : a good way to review the lectures!

I recommend this book to readers interested in where Homo sapiens fit in the great scheme of things. Usually left to philosophers, this task is now tackled by historians. A recent field of inquiry within World History, Big History attempts to place Homo sapiens in the context of the universe. Although similarly fine books on Big History exist, Cynthia Stokes Brown's book is a very good introduction to this field of inquiry. The book is divided into two parts. Part I deals with the emergence of the universe as we know it, and of own neighborhood in the space. It then reviews the emergence of the living Earth, Homo sapiens, and hunter-gather societies. We learn how life forms depend on their non-living surroundings, how Homo sapiens are literally stardust, and how we are animals very much related to other living beings. That, in a profound sense, the Earth itself is a living organism.

As may be expected, Part II dealing with the last 10,000 years is much longer reviewing world history proper. Stokes Brown points to emerging patterns in human history as "civilization" emerges and develops up to the present. Here she is much influenced by Fernand Braudel's school of history. The focus is very much on circulation of people, animals, goods, technologies, and diseases.

In my opinion, this approach creates a number of problems when the author deals with the emergence of capitalism and industrialization. The profit motive, very much in focus these days with the current massive "financial" crisis, takes the backseat to technologies and consumer behavior. Thus, solution to the current social and environmental/ecological problems become obscure. By offering a final chapter called "What Now,? What Next?" Stokes Brown correctly turns our attention to finding solutions to these problems. But somehow, the powerful case she builds about our place in the universe is lost and attention is focus to the narrow debate in the mainstream. This debate not only ignores the capitalist foundation of society, it also forgets the very context of who we (Homo sapiens) are. Thus the logical of the story Stokes Brown has told, that the only solution to our the crisis caused by capitalist social order is to return to a society where we can live in harmony with nature (as hunter-gathers did to a great extent without having the benefit the state of our current knowledge) is lost.