Customer Reviews

The Cartoon History of the Universe II, Volumes 8-13: From the Springtime of China to the Fall of Rome (Pt.2)

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As with Larry Gonick's other guides he manages to pull off the trick of being both amusing and edifying. He also has the artistic flare for painting history in broad yet revealing brush strokes.
The second instalment of his history of the Universe covers ancient India, China's early years and Rome from its mythical founding to its very real collapse.
Gonick is not afraid to offend. His depictions of Jesus, Krisna, Buddha and Confucius are all less than entirely flattering. While he is not the sort to be disrespectful through ignorance, Gonick will not fail to pick out the more obvious weaknesses of any institution or historical figure he comes across. He even takes a swipe at one of Afrocentrisms unjustified claims. Although in the end he pays due recognition to the achievements of each of these figures it is possibly best to avoid this book if you are the sort to yell "Blasphemy!".
Anybody else who has a sense of humour and an interest in history should get their hands on this book immediately.

Every book in this series is both funny and intelligent. Much of the dumb humor comes from getting the facts straight. Even small details like Galba jumping into his boyfriend's arms after learning that he has been declared emporer is from Tacitus.

This is my favorite by virtue of being about Ancient Rome, its rise as a Republic, the height of Empire and its collapse into the dark ages. The fact that he doesn't flinch from the more scandalous details (such as Tiberius' proclivities towards little boys) or skimp over some of the more interesting controversies of the time (Josephus comes off as a wily con artist) makes it that much more entertaining. And I also would have never read The Fall and Decline of the Roman Empire had it not been for this book. And trust me, Edward Gibbons rocks.

Besides, the Western History, Gonick also spends a great deal of time with Indian and Chinese history. One of the major crimes of our education system is the fact that this is all probably very basic material, but the best source for it is probably in a cartoon book. Still, it's a great cartoon book and you can't fault the cartoon book for the deficiencies in other educational venues.

Even though this is a collection of cartoons and the text in the dialog balloons is generally meant to be frivolous, it is possible to learn a lot of history from the book. Unlike so many history books that concentrate on Western Europe and derivatives, this one deals extensively with India and China. Volume 8 deals with the early history of India and how the great religions that we associate with India arose. From it, you also learn the origins of the great early works of Indian civilization such as Bhagavad Gita.
The origins of the ancient Chinese civilization are covered in volumes 9 and 10. Most of the points deal with the battles for supremacy and feature court intrigue, deception and a lot of killing. We tend to think of massive deaths in war as being a modern invention, but that is a misconception. Well before the year 0, the army of Chin was ambushed and massacred, over 200,000 men were killed in one day.
Chapter 11 begins with the last days of Alexander the Great. It correctly points out that while Alexander was married to a Persian, that union was largely political. The great love of Alexander's life was Hephaestion, his male grand vizier. When Hephaestion died, Alexander grieved over the body for two days. The next sections chronicle the origin and rise of Rome as a great power. Once again, it is largely a tale of murder, intrigue and war. As the power of Rome grew, it was no longer possible to maintain the republican form of government. At first the supreme position was called the consulship, where the holder was powerful, but not yet a dictator. All this changed when Julius Caesar marched off to conquer Gaul and then returned to march on Rome. This began several decades of near constant warfare in the Empire, some of which was civil.
The numbers of people that were killed in these wars are amazing to consider. Some history books estimate that Julius Caesar killed over a million while in Gaul. Descriptions of Western history describe the carnage of World Wars I and II as unprecedented in human history. In fact, the concept of total war with deaths numbered in the hundreds of thousands or millions is an old theme of history. The wars that took place between the Europeans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were comparatively limited in consequence.
After a few pages, the discerning reader will understand that the text in the captions is generally designed to impart the history while the balloon dialog is reserved for the humor. I enjoyed this book immensely, learning many things about Chinese history. I also learned some additional details about western history. If there is a theme to the history presented here, it is how many people were killed in acts of the powerful fighting for control. We tend to think of the twentieth century as being the bloodiest on record. That is probably not the case. Given the carnage that occurred in China and the Mediterranean even before the birth of Christ, there might be centuries before the A. D. label that were bloodier. That fact is disturbing, whether learned by text or by cartoon.

Comics have no limits. Anything can get depicted with words and pictures. And, after Larry Gonick completes his "Cartoon History of the Universe" series, most everything will be. Over the past three decades Gonick has stretched modern comics from the purely fictional into the scientific and historic. He has cartoonified esoteric subjects that would bore most medieval scriveners. Snoozers like statistics, genetics, physics, chemistry (and the one exception, that great unmentionable - blush, blush - puritans look away quick!) come alive like golems to terrorize despisers of knowledge. These collections make learning palatable even for those with Beavis and Butthead mentalities. As such, that unobtainable indefatigable unreachable, almost paradoxical, oxymoron of oxymorons, the "educational comic," seems close to fruition and perfection. Somewhere an educator just gagged. Above all, as if turning the comics industry on its head wasn't enough, Gonick has undertaken his magnum opus: a multivolume chronological multicultural history of our known universe in cartoon form. Overachiever detector! Bzzzt! Bzzzzt!

Book I, volumes 1-7, of this pen and paper masterwork started with a BIG BANG and wormed its way to Alexander the Great's voluminous conquests. Book II, volumes 8 - 13, picks up where it left off, but not before taking a dizzying tour through India and China. Volume eight covers India from Harappa to the Bhagavad-Gita (with its eerie page length depiction of Krishna's "revelation" to Arjuna) and Ashoka with the origins of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism tossed into the cultural salad. Gonick also manages a stunning two page summary of the Mahabharata, the 74,000 verse Hindu epic creation poem. Only comics could pull this off. Volumes 9 and 10 grapple with the infinity of Chinese history. Court intrigues, gory wars, philosophers such as Sun Wu, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Chuang-Tzu, and a breakneck tour through the Hsia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties make for entertaining and brain bursting reading. Knowledge overload. Be sure to cool the brain often. These sections provide an efficient gloss of Chinese history up to 9 A.D. Then to Rome for volumes 11 - 13. Via a detour through the short life of Alexander the Great, King Romulus (after rudely impaling Remus on a sword) founded the city that still bears his name. That's what killing your brother gets you, apparently. Great morality tale there, indeed. Later, after love-starved Romans hauled off the Sabine women, one of Tarquin the Proud's cronies raped Lucretia ("Don't blame me! I never heard this word before..."). Out of honor she stabbed herself and Junius Brutus led the charge to overthrow the corrupt kings and initiated the Roman Republic. All was sort of fine until the Gauls invaded, (depicted here with various characters from Asterix), the Ides of March, and Caesar Octavianus took full power. The Roman Empire began. Book II ends with the fall of the Western Roman empire. Lots more happens in between, of course, but world history often defies even cursory summary.

One interesting interlude involves Jesus or, as the book calls him, "Jeshua Ben Joseph" ("Jesus" doesn't come along until the Greeks name Jeshua "Christ" or "Messiah"). Gonick makes brief mention of the Gospels of Mary Magdalene and even depicts the unmentionable. (Oooh! NOW you want to read it, don't you? Slobber! Drool!) Gonick takes a unique look at this pivotal point in history. His ultimate viewpoint emanates from the asides.

"The Cartoon History of The Universe" won't transform anyone into a historian. Information overload sags the brain quick and often. Chinese history in particular will seem like a blur. So much happens. Regardless, this series has the power, unlike most text-based histories, to suck any skeptic into the bizarre narrative that makes up human history. If nothing else, readers will get a good overview of just how varied, strange, violent, provocative, and sometimes cruel our past is. We're goofy creatures. No series has made this point better, or more humorously, or with better cartoons, than this one.

The Cartoon History of the Universe is an excellent series. Volume two covers history from the death of Alexander the Great through the fall of Rome and includes Chinese history up through around 0 AD.

One thing that I really like about this series is the good research that went into it. Although sources are not given in footnotes or interspersed in the text, there is a bibliography, and Gonick includes enough detail to make it possible to verify the facts he states. So basically it is well written and doesn't use being a comic book as an excuse to be sloppy. I wouldn't feel odd about citing it as a reference on a term paper, and I actually did cite this one. Another nice feature is that humor is usually in the form of little anecdotes that actually happened and not slapstick. History is full of colorful characters (Nero anyone?) and so it can be presented interestingly with a bit of effort and research. Gonick does that here.

I recommend The Cartoon History of the Universe to everybody. The humor and visuals are nice to apply to a subject which can seem like a dull stream of names and dates at times. It is a good supplement to a history class, because it covers in depth some things that tend to only be included in history classes for the sake of political correctness. For example, Gonick's history of China is in depth and covered with the same research and humor as the European history. In most history books the sections on China are very stiff and PC. To me this book is valuable if only for the section on Chinese history.

This is one of those books that you have to tell people to buy, because if you loan it to someone, chances are you'll never see it again.

As a historian who bemoans the lack of interest shown by most kids today in the subject, I applaud Larry Gonick for giving us another tool to use in trying to spark enthusiasm. The humor is great, and in some places almost bawdy, which keeps a teenager's attention far better than a list of emperors in a textbook. Example: Julius Ceasar tries to ask an intellectual question of Cleaopatra. She responds as she leans over him seductively, "You sure talk a lot for a guy with your reputation." All the scandal and sex and violence of history (and the religions that have driven it) are here, not hidden as they are in most texts. All the excitement of pop culture, but with substance behind it, not to mention an excellent bibliography. This series is the only set of books that I have known students to actually read from cover to cover without expecting a test. Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in history, or anyone with a sense of humor.

This book is not as entertaining as the earlier volume. But it does cover a lot of history, and certainly is one way to get kids today learning some history. The reading list in the back of the book is excellent.

Although Gonick's second cartoon take on the history of the peoples of planet earth is lacking some of the flavor of the first book, this follow up is entertaining and richly informative in its own right.

I think a problem here is that in the first book we were treated to Gonick's zesty wit and in here it too often fell into the realm of biting sarcasm, and that wasn't as much fun. Gonick also spent too much time in eastern Asia and not enough in Rome. His non-reverent views on Jesus, whom he treated like just another historical personage--and possibly a disreputable/looney one at that--presented the central figure of western history in a thought-provoking light that should take many off guard. (But Gonick raised a couple interesting questions: If Jesus was so important, why did the Romans let his followers go? And why did Jesus get so mad at the tree not producing fruit in spring, when the tree wasn't supposed to bear fruit till autumn?)

In covering the period between the death of Alexander and the collapse of Roman central authority, Gonick chose a far more limited time from which to create his canvas, but even so the subjects came across as less explored than the 'billions and billions' of years the first Cartoon history worked through. But enough nitpicking. Gonick is a genius and this is better reading material than most history books out there.

Well done, Larry!

This second book in the Cartoon History of the Universe series is every bit as good as the first! This book is extremely well researched, and is a great overview of many of the periods and people that have shaped history. Although I would recommend that readers also take advantage of the extensive bibliography to learn more (and possibly contradictory) information on these periods/people, this book is an excellent resource. As an added bonus, it's also great fun to read!! Gonick has a knack of not taking himself (or his subjects) too seriosly, and a few noses get tweaked along the way.

Overall, this is an excellent history book, and an excellent comic book. I highly recommend this book to fans of either genre!!

Never has history been so fun, or so understandable. Gonick really adds substance to dates and facts and his subtle humor can really make you question about long-held beliefs you may have had.

I will admit that at times, the book seems a little stretched thin, as if he's hurrying to get through everything, but on the whole, Cartoon History of the Universe allows the student of history to gain a quick insight to the events that shaped our world.