The World

The World by Simon Sebag Montefiore is an accessible fresh history of the world told through families: some famous, some obscure, spanning all eras and all continents. Starting with the first footsteps of a family walking along a beach 950,000 years ago, Montefiore steers us through an interconnected world via palace intrigues, love affairs and family lives. Following history''s themes - war, migration, plague, religion, medicine and technology, it is tethered to the people at the heart of human drama: a cast of extraordinary span and diversity - empresses and conquerors, artists and doctors, husbands, wives and children. There''s Sargon who built the Akkadian empire and his daughter Enheduanna, the first published female poet; Alexander the Great, more ruthless dictator than chivalrous warrior of myth; Hongwu who started as a beggar and founded the Ming dynasty; Ewuare the Leopard-King whose capital Benin rivalled any in Europe; King Henry of Haiti who forged an enlightened realm from a rebel slave colony; Kamehameha conqueror of Hawaii who took on the Europeans; as well as Attila, Genghis Khan, Columbus, Ivan the Terrible, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Freud, Bolivar, Bismarck, Hitler, Stalin and Mao. We meet extraordinary women: Zenobia, the Arab empress who defied Rome, Wu, the self-made empress of China, Lady Murasaki, the first female novelist, Sayyida al-Hurra, Moroccan pirate-queen; Maria Theresa who saved her empire and Sally Hemings the enslaved woman with whom Thomas Jefferson had six children; as well as Thatcher and Indira Gandhi. Here are the Caesars, Medicis and Incas, Ottomans and Mughals, Bonapartes, Habsburgs and Zulus, Rothschilds, Rockerfellers, Churchills, Kennedys, Castros, Nehrus, Pahlavis and Kenyattas, Saudis, Kims and Assads - up to Putin and Zelenskyy. All human life is here. A rare, dazzling achievement as spellbinding as fiction, The World is the story of humanity in all its complexity, told in a single narrative by a master storyteller. ...

Préface
A thrilling, epic and original history of humanity from a dazzlingly fresh and global perspective, from the prize-winning, bestselling historian Simon Sebag Montefiore.

Auteur
Simon Sebag Montefiore is the internationally bestselling author of prize-winning books that have been published in forty-eight languages. CATHERINE THE GREAT & POTEMKIN was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize; STALIN: THE COURT OF THE RED TSAR won History Book of the Year Prize at the British Book Awards; YOUNG STALIN won the Costa Biography Award, the LA Times Book Prize for Biography, the Kreisky Prize and the Grand Prix de la Biographie Politique; JERUSALEM: THE BIOGRAPHY won the JBC Book of the Year Prize and the Wenjin Book Prize in China; THE ROMANOVS: 1613-1918 won the Lupicaia del Terriccio Book Prize. He is the author of the Moscow Trilogy of novels: SASHENKA, RED SKY AT NOON and ONE NIGHT IN WINTER, which won the Political Fiction Book of the Year Award. He is also the author of WRITTEN IN HISTORY: LETTERS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD and VOICES OF HISTORY: SPEECHES THAT CHANGED THE WORLD.

Texte du rabat

The World by Simon Sebag Montefiore is a fresh new history of the world, told through families. It begins with the first human footsteps ever found: a family of five, an adult and four children, walking along a beach 950,000 years ago. This is a history of deep themes - religion, empire, technology, ideology - but tethered to the biography of families at the heart of the essential drama of human existence. All life, every race and faith, is here, a study of interconnectivity and hybridity.

The families in this book are African, Asian, European, American, Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, Jewish, Christian: they ruled kingdoms from Benin and Rome, Mali to Beijing, Cairo to Tokyo, Angkor to Constantinople. We meet the families of Genghis Khan and the Caesars, the Ottomans and Habsburgs, the Ethiopian Solomonids and Japanese Sun lineages, the Medici, the Incas, the Saudis, Castros and Rothschilds, right up to the Assads and Kims, the Kennedys, Bushes and the Obamas.

The World is the story of humanity from prehistory to the present day, examining power, literature, war, art, science and daily life, and features the lives of a stunningly eclectic cast of the unknown and the great, each of whom are connected in a multitude of ways. Montefiore weaves a compelling narrative introducing the reader to the exuberance, ingenuity, idiosyncrasy, cruelty and misery of human experience, the variety of character and of culture, and presents the history of the world in all its complexity as no writer has done before.