17 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Deeply, deeply disappointed, March 8, 2006
This review is from: Documents in World History: The Great Tradition, Volume 1 (From Ancient Times to 1500) (4th Edition) (Paperback)
This book represents the nadir of world history: wide-ranging, superficially impressive, and totally devoid of real scholarship. "Documents in World History" seemed like an excellent resource for a world history course. However, it is written by people who are obviously unqualified.
For a good compendium of primary documents for a world history course, I would recommend "World History" by Howard Spodek (the accompanying supplements, listed on the publisher's website, are promising as well).
The first things which surprised me was the poor production quality of this book. For the ridiculous price, one would expect at least a few color photos. But beautiful artwork is rendered in stale, pixellated black and white. I imagine this book was published more for the sake of profit than scholarship.
The authors of "Documents in World History" fail utterly to show which documents are important, and which are just curiosities. The entry for Cyrus the Great fails to show this king's mythical status in Iran and even in Greece, which idolized Cyrus despite his attempts (and those of his descendants) to conquer Greece.
The sections on China are pathetic. The authors do not have any understanding of Confucianism or Chinese literature.
The greatest writer in the Chinese language, Su Shi, has only one poem in this collection. Yet that gives the authors an opportunity to display their total ignorance of China, its language, and even the fact that Chinese people have a surname and a given name. Su Shi has his name misspelled as "Sushi". Another important writer, Bai Juyi, has his name morphed into Bo Zhuyi, which can be quite confusing because "Ju" and "Zhu" are totally different in Chinese. This may seem like nitpicking, but imagine if the authors had misspelled the names of Shakespeare AND Dickens because they couldn't tell the difference between the letters "z" and "k".
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