The Cartoon History of the Universe III: From the Rise of Arabia to the Renaissance [Hardcover]

Larry Gonick (Author)

Book Description

Series: Cartoon History of the Earth | Publication Date: October 21, 2002

An irreverent survey in comics spanning world history from the birth of Islam to the Byzantine Empire to the Italian Renaissance.

Larry Gonick's celebrated series The Cartoon History of the Universe is a unique fusion of world history and the comics medium, a work of serious scholarship and a masterpiece of popular literature. Praised by historians as a narrative and interpretive tour de force, Gonick's clever illustrations deliver important information with a deceptively light tone, teaching us about the people and events that have shaped our world.

This long-awaited new volume covers the Middle Ages around the globe, including the origin and spread of Islam; West Africa and the cross-Saharan trade; Central Asia and the Byzantine Empire; the European Dark Ages and the Crusades; the Mongol conquests; the Black Death; the Ottoman Empire; the Italian Renaissance; and the rise of Spain, leading up to Columbus's departure for the New World. Highlighting key events and retrieving oft-neglected historical connections, Gonick offers an historical survey that is at once multicultural, humanistic, skeptical, and laugh-out-loud funny.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The second volume of Gonick's deeply researched, lucid and hilarious overview of history was published eight years ago. Good things take time, evidently. This third installment begins in the year 395, with the closing of Europe's pagan temples, and ends in 1492, with Columbus and crew setting sail. Readers get an overview of nearly everything that occurred between those two events, from the origins of Islam to the great Chinese dynasties and the Crusades, with "flashbacks" to the rise of African culture, the Turco-Mongol tribes and more. Gonick's take on history is whip-smart, skeptical about familiar but questionable stories and absolutely in command of dozens of simultaneous historical threads. He's also very funny, even at his most respectful. (In the chapter on the life of Muhammad, for instance, he makes a running joke of keeping the prophet permanently off-panel.) Gonick is fond of wacky little digressions, and the book includes plenty of learned slapstick (one ongoing gag concerns the "amazing amount of eye-gouging" in Byzantine history). The architecture and clothes in Gonick's work are drawn with convincing realism, but the people are broad, goofy caricatures, which somehow makes the entire presentation even friendlier: in fact, the author employs a handful of walk-ons disheveled, mustachioed academic types to explain the more complicated points.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School-This clever, wickedly funny book begins with the birth of Islam, steps back for an overview of the history of Africa, jumps to Turkey and China, peeks at the Dark Ages in Europe, heads back to the Middle East for the Crusades, and wraps up with Christopher Columbus heading west. Gonick has a knack for finding intriguing bits of history that tend to be overlooked in conventional texts and reporting them with irreverent humor, as with the story of the group of Meccans who visited a cathedral in Ethiopia and left an unusual calling card. ("&*%$# pagans pooped in my church!" the king complains to the Islamic missionaries.) The book is a mixture of careful research and quips, often dwelling on the irony of people's actions versus their stated beliefs. The black-and-white art is energetic, sometimes spare, but generally evocative of time and place. Highly entertaining.
Susan Salpini, Fairfax County Public Schools, VA
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 300 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (October 21, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393051846
• ISBN-13: 978-0393051841
• Product Dimensions: 10.6 x 8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,418,012 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Larry Gonick has been creating comics that explain history, science, and other big subjects for more than thirty years, ever since Blood from a Stone: A Cartoon Guide to Tax Reform appeared in 1977. He has been a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT and is staff cartoonist for Muse magazine.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Well-researched and more fun to read than Durant, December 20, 2002

By 

Michael K. Smith (South Louisiana) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Cartoon History of the Universe III: From the Rise of Arabia to the Renaissance (Paperback)

Gonick is a highly trained mathematician who more or less left academe to become a cartoonist, and has won several awards in that endeavor. He's also a very fair general historian, especially in the way of multi-everything synthesis. This volume comprises volumes 14-19 in the series (as they were originally published), covering the back-story to and rise of Islam, the post-Roman history of Africa, the further development of China and India, and all the complexity of events taking place in Central Asia. Oh, yeah -- Europe, too! Actually, most of us with professional historian's training are still apt to think in European and North American terms, for which Gonick's work is a great antidote. He also puts paid to any notion of Islam being a "peaceful" religion -- no more than Christianity, certainly -- and readers with a knowledge of Jewish history also will be nodding at his witty but pointed renderings. And how many comic books have you read that include an index and an annotated bibliography?

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pure Masterpiece - INCREDIBLE, December 5, 2002

By 

"topcat817" (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Cartoon History of the Universe III: From the Rise of Arabia to the Renaissance (Paperback)

I just finished reading this third volume of the greatest history books ever! It's simply a masterpiece. Larry Gonick has a superbly keen sense of understanding political, cultural, and even economical atmospheres in the context of the era he covers in this book (appox. 500-1500 CE). All the significant events and trends are tied together in an incredibly witty way, and always in a global context. He cleverly shows how interrelated and interdependent the world was back then. Jewish kingdom in Central Asia, Normans at the Balkans, and the Christian mother of Kublai Khan are all the surprizing new gems of knowledge I gained from this delightful book. Drawing-wise, I am glad Gonick took extra effort (better than Volume II) to create a feast of imagery and emotion. His medium of cartoon really gives much more than plain texts, especially historical texts. Just look into all those sad expressions of the ill-fated ones, and don't tell me you dont get sympathetic!

Volume I was my favorite book when I was in middle school, Volume II during my senior year in high school, and now, with a degree in History, I still get inspired and taught by this new, and best yet, volume of the History of the Universe series.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Hello, stranger, November 19, 2002

By 

Center Man "[e-mail]" (Norwich, CT United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Cartoon History of the Universe III: From the Rise of Arabia to the Renaissance (Paperback)

It's been eight years since the last volume of Larry Gonick's fitfully-amusing, often-infuriating and always-interesting chronicle came out. Was Volume 3 worth the wait?

Well, no, not really. I don't envy Gonick the task of squeezing three continents and 800 years into 300 pages, but he was able to do the second volume in four years, and many fans have been tapping our fingers with impatience waiting for this one to come out.

That snit-fit out of the way, the book is all you'd expect from the previous volumes, with terrific chapters on the rise of Islam and the Mongols. The narrative gallops along at a brisk pace, with unexpected surprises and much needed chronicles of dark chapters in history, like Visigothic Spain. Gonick also cuts back on some of his politically-correct tendencies and amps up the humor in this work. You're not going to agree with all of Gonick's conclusions, he gets a few things wrong (the dates of Clovis' reign in France come 40 years after the man died) and is generally too hard on Europe and too easy on the Byzantine Empire and the caliphate.

These are minor nits to pick, though. The book is as engaging as other entries in the series, and more informative than some straight histories. Here's hoping we don't have to wait another decade for Volume IV.