Customer Reviews

The Life Millennium: The 100 Most Important Events and People of the Past 1000 Years

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I bought this book in a hurry, just for the imagery. However, later, when I had a chance to actually read it, I was pleasantly surprised. It is a quite intelligent and creative summation of the past 1000 years. Although it hits all the usual highlights, this book rises above the Time-Life standard, sinking neither into sentimentality nor into thoughtless platitudes. I would recommend this book to people who are building image collections. Additionally (and I mean this in the best possible sense), this is the kind of book that should be in doctors' waiting rooms: it can be read in fits and spurts, and is a smart picture book. It might also reengage a middle-schooler who has gone off socail studies.

What an interesting topic! Unfortunately, however,
the list of the top 100 people of the millennium
seems distorted by misunderstood patriotism.

For example, the top spot got assigned to Edison,
for some quite nonobvious reason. Sure, Edison was a fine
inventor, but even during his lifetime there were non-US
inventors whose inventions had greater impact than Edison's.
And to let him preside over the entire millennium will really
seem like the most amazing stretch of patriotism, at least to foreigners.

The unsuspecting reader is left with the impression that
Edison was the most important contributor to the light
bulb, although he was just one of those who improved it.
Goebel invented the first true light bulb in 1854,
Woodward and Evans patented one in 1875, Swan built one
with carbon filament in 1878, and Edison purchased the
1875 patent and had a team of co-workers try
many alternative materials until
they were able to prolong the burning time in 1879.

Likewise, most of Edison's numerous other patents
were just improvements of older inventions (exception:
the grammophone). Moreover, even the 19th century (leave
allone the entire millennium) saw greater
inventions than the light bulb or the grammophone, e.g,
gasoline engine and car (Benz; note that it is the car
industry that became the TwenCen's dominant industry,
not the light bulb industry), or the dynamo for making
electricity (Siemens), or the electric motor (Faraday).
Other contemporaries whose impact exceeded Edison's
include Darwin (evolution theory) and Haber (artificial
fertilizer, most influential TwenCen invention according
to NATURE, July 1999, p.415: increasing the world's
population from 1.6 to 6 billion).

Similarly, the Wright bros got the #20 spot, while
the first human flights (France, 18th century) and
the first powered heavier-than-air flight (Ader, 1890)
are not even mentioned. Even Lilienthal does not appear
in the top 100, although he performed 2500 flights
long before the Wrights.

I guess the main problem with the book is that
patriotic inaccuracies and overstatements
invalidate and actually ridicule the entire top 100 list.

A positive note: at least the top 10 event list does not seem
unreasonable, topped by bookprint (Gutenberg re-invented
this Chinese technology and thus started the Western
information age), steam engine (start of the industrial
revolution; Watt improved the previous models),
Protestantism (only major new religion of the past
1000 years), and the discovery of the New World
(Columbus, 1492).

But given this more or less convincing event
list it comes as an even greater surprise to see
one of several influential 19th century inventors
placed ahead of truly influential giants such as Gutenberg
and Watt and Luther and Newton and Einstein and Columbus.
I think it is fair to say that no decent round of experts
(say, an international group of history professors) would
place Edison anywhere near the top 30.

Anyway, the book is an interesting documentation of a
particular world view, and does contain edifying
information. I give it two stars.

This is the fairest treatment of the events of the past millennium that I have seen. Who would have thought of the germ theory of disease being important? They did and its in the book. Buy it.