Customer Reviews

Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (California World History Library)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

David Christian's Map's of Time might bare the standard for non-parochial academic scholarship for years to come. Starting with the "big bang," Christian charts history from the beginning of the universe to the 21st century by drawing parallels between astronomical, biological, and historical phenomena. While the ambitious scope of this project might prove misguidedly off-putting to the narrow academic specialist (which certainly includes most academics), Christian deserves credit for painting a broad picture amidst an academic culture that prizes knowing more about less.
No one, even Christian, could possibly claim expertise in all the fields that this book traverses. Appropriately and refreshingly, rather than obscuring their works in the footnotes, Christian gives credits to the works of experts whose arguments he draws from within the main text. With a work of this scope, such credit is necessary often. Christian does not use much primary source material, which, again, will make professional historians question the work's greater relevance. But as he states in the introduction, while less accepted in academia, synthesizing information is often as important a task as discovering and presenting new information. This approach is more appealing for many intellectually engaged individuals who do not have the time or energy to keep up with the cutting edge of narrowly defined fields. If academics do not embrace such broader interdisciplinary projects then writers with less scholarly discipline will find eager audiences.
Without much prior knowledge of astronomical jargon, I found Christian's explanation of the big bang, quasars, black holes, star formation, the basic laws of gravitation, and many other complex astronomical phenomena both accessible and fascinating. His coverage of the controversies surrounding precise dating of human ancestors is exhaustive and his explanation of human evolution is cogent. As a historian, however, I think he probably dedicates too much time to these two sections (nearly half of the text).
From the agricultural to the industrial revolution, Christian stresses the interaction between different civilizations or "global zones" of influence as the primary dynamic in history, at least in Africa/Asia/Europe. This methodology illuminates the importance of interaction between civilizations and attempts to display the parochialism of studying "western" or "eastern" civilization in isolation. In this vein, this book responds to the increasing importance of globalization and the subsequent push in the academy and secondary schools for "world history." Yet while this might be an effective approach to analyzing dissemination of technology, the transmission of disease, and the integration of economies, it leaves much to be desired in the way of ideology and world views, which undoubtedly shapes history.
With the coming of the industrial revolution and the emergence of the nation state, Christian shifts his focus to Europe and eventually America. This focus is appropriate given that, for better or for worse, western nations have shaped most of history for the past two centuries. Christian's analysis of the environmental degradation that resulted from industrial nation states past and continuing attempts to consume more in the twentieth century is particularly powerful. Through extensive use of statistics, he shows that the current rate of population increases and consumption is unsustainable. This is not new news but putting this within a broad panorama of history goes a long way towards showing us just how profligate our society is. Ultimately, it makes Christian's speculation on possible futures especially relevant.
All told, this book is well-written, imaginative, and cogent. Realize, however, that Christian is not an expert in all these fields and will not leave readers with more specialized knowledge satisfied with his coverage of their areas of specialization.

Weaknesses of the book
-The cosmology section assumes a very low level of knowledge about the subject, and will not be terribly interesting to those who have read more detailed accounts.
-The part of the book covering human civilizations, meanwhile, assumes a great deal of foreknowledge about the details of history (Christian provides virtually no discussion of the rise or fall of particular empires or political systems), making the text rather less useful to those without a reasonable knowledge of world history in the last 3,000 years.
-Christian's use of scientific terms and statistics can be at times misleading (though this may be unintentional). For example, when comparing rich countries to poor countries, Christian uses data unadjusted for differences in purchasing power, thus greatly amplifying the magnitude of income gaps. And again when emphasizing the rise of the multinational corporation, Christian compares the total market value of large corporations to the annual GDPs of nations, thus increasing the apparent size of the corporations.
-Finally, Christian seems at times unreasonably defensive of Marx and critical of free markets, at one point bemoaning that "Sadly, the Communist revolutions of the twentieth century suggest that overthrowing capitalism may be an extremely destructive project." (478). Why is that sad? Why does "Communism" begin with a capital "C" while "capitalism" does not? I may be nitpicking here, but he goes on like this for some time (incidentally, and perhaps only coincidentally, Christian has his doctorate in Russian history).

Strengths of the book
-The dustjacket is really nice. That may be trivial, but boy does this tome look good on a bookshelf.
-The book really does cover a lot of ground, going from the dawn of the universe through all of human history, rounding off with predictions which extend right through to the death of the last stars and the ultimate victory of thermodynamics' second law.
-Every chapter ends with a recommended reading list which is alone almost worth buying the book for.
-The writing style is at times irresistible; I could scarcely put down the book to relieve myself in pages 335-440 about the rise of the modern period.

Intellectually stimulating, rapid-fire journey, the "powers of 10" movie specialized for history buffs. Some of the material I found superficial/generalized to be of substance, but the author acknowledges that can be the nature of Big History. An ambitious book which talks directly to ideas that most historians only philosophically discuss. A charge of inductive reasoning would not be far fetched, ie. cherry picking of facts to support prefigured models. Excellent overview of Big History and World History ideas and methods and themes. Annotated bibliographies at the end of each chapter, and large one at the end of the book, are very good for further exploration, most book recommendations are recent (1990s and early 2000s). Despite criticisms learned some new and important perspectives and recommend it highly.

David Christian's Maps of Time is a tour de force of macrohistory. Starting with the Big Bang, he leads readers up to the twenty-first century in only 500 pages. Contrary to the review that is listed with the book, he provides an up-to-date discussion of cosmology and related issues that lead to the emergence of hominids and homo sapiens. Always staying above any hint of favoring this or that theory, or this or that region, he pinpoints the considerable similarities that mark the human experience through broad time frames and using examples from the entire world. His remarks on the twentieth century, which he considers the most dramatic century in terms of change, are especially illuminating. Christian is not just writing a history book here. He is attempting to write what he calls a modern origin myth, that is, a way of placing human beings in the cosmos that makes sense in terms of the enormous range of information available to us. Whether he succeeds or not will be judged differently by different people, but one has to admire the grandeur of the effort. And it reads well too.

This important book is so well written that, despite its broad sweep and intellectual distinction, it flows beautifully. The first chapters provide one of the simplest and clearest descriptions of cosmology I've ever read, perhaps even bettter than Neil deGrasse Tyson's in Natural History. Christian provides a marvellous theoretical framework for understanding history as playing out repetitive patterns, and the sweep of learning, while careful, is extraordinary.

I took his class last semester, and used the book. Fortunately it coincided with my views of the world, and I was able to finish the book and class with ease.
This book teaches you your spot in the universe. How people, matter, creatures and geography have lived and died, shaping the coils of history to bring you to where you stand today. This is the most scientific and coherent compilation of explanations we have today - Christian is able to see the bits and pieces of life that is around us, and put it together in a book. His theories that are scattered around the book are interesting in themselves.

Mostly this is a very good book, which is amazing considering how much Christian tries to do. It is well worth reading, though hard to follow in places. Having given it five stars, let me offer a few warnings for potential readers:

Christian can be kind of fuzzy. For a book of history there are remarkably few dates, and I often found myself asking, "Just when did this take place?" I was also bothered by the way Christian didn't "define his terms." For example, a fair amount of the last part of the book talks about Europe becoming "commercial." But he never tells us just what he means by commercial, or how we can tell when one country is more commercial than another, or how we can tell whether a country has gotten a lot more commercial or just a little more commercial.

I was especially frustrated by a section near the end. He seems to say, "The modern world is capitalist. The modern world has tremendous poverty. Therefore, capitalism has caused tremendous poverty." This seems silly. Most people would agree that capitalism involves well-defined and well-protected property rights, and a large amount of freedom to engage in economic transactions without interference by a government. By this standard, much of the world isn't all that capitalist. Moreover, in general, the less "capitalist" the country, the poorer it is. Blaming capitalism for poverty seems like blaming medicine when people refuse to allow their children to get vaccinated and then the kids get sick. No doubt Christian means something different by capitalism--but since he doesn't say what, it is impossible to know how to agree or disagree.

A major theme of the book is that for most of the last two thousand years, the richest areas of the world were southwest Asia (mesopotamia and Persia), south Asia (India) and east Asia (China). As late as 1800, a "man from Mars" would have reported back to his home planet that India and China, not Europe, were where people lived best. The book then seems to say that a century later, China and India were poverty-stricken. Yet aside from a reference to the Opium Wars (and some reading between the lines about population increase), there is no explanation of how such a monumental change happened.

Sometimes Christian doesn't realize the power of simple arithmetic. If one farm family can produce enough food to feed one family, just about everyone has to be a farmer. If technology improves so that one farm family can feed two families, one half of the farm families will have to cease being farmers. If technology means one farm family can feed three, two thirds of the farm families have to get out of the ancestral business. Whether the process will be negative ("thrown off the land") or positive (peasants flee "the idiocy of rural life" for the increased stimulation and opportunity of urban areas) will depend on a lot of things, but the fact that it happens follows directly from the increased productivity. High agricultural productivity dooms a peasantry.

David Christian had a great ambition with this book: to write the history of everything there has ever been. In other words, it describes not only human history but also natural history from the very first beginning. Of course, I had read this on the cover but I had not quite anticipated how elaborate and detailedly the author would describe the formation of the cosmos from the moment of the big bang. I had expected the book to go rather briefly through this part of history and to move on quickly to human history. But I was pleasantly surprised because this first part of the book turned out to be the most fascinating part, as far as I am concerned. The rest of the book is quite interesting too, I must add. The plan and ambition of this book are great, the way the author has worked them out, too. If you liked THE HUMAN WEB by JR McNeill and William H. McNeill, you may like MAPS OF TIME even more. If you admired A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME by Stephen Hawking, you may admire this book just as much.

The book is not always easy, but well worth reading. It debates the different theories about life, the Universe and everything, through zooming in. The first part is about the big bang en the formation of stars, than follows the geological processes that formed the earth, the evolution of live, humans and our history. It ends with the 20 th century and possible futures. What I liked most about this book, was that it did not present a clear story, but gave the facts, and the different theories (different stories) that might come with those facts.
It was for me the book at the center of my expending library, because it comes with a extensive bibliography from which I'm now selecting books about the different parts of the big everything to continue reading.
The best book I've read in years (and I read a lot of (non)fiction books, about a large variaty of subjects).

Dr. Christian's view is that history should begin with the creation of the Universe and look at over-arching themes. While this is an interesting concept, Dr. Christian fails to provide enough background information to the non-historian to see how the details support the bigger picture. It is a good methodology book for historians looking to see larger concepts, but it assumes a level of historical knowledge lacking in many laymen.