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The Invention of Yesterday
- A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection
- Narrated by: Tamim Ansary
- Length: 17 hrs and 4 mins
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Publisher's summary
From language to culture to cultural collision: the story of how humans invented history, from the Stone Age to the Virtual Age
Traveling across millennia, weaving the experiences and world views of cultures both extinct and extant, The Invention of Yesterday shows that the engine of history is not so much heroic (battles won), geographic (farmers thrive), or anthropogenic (humans change the planet) as it is narrative.
Many thousands of years ago, when we existed only as countless small autonomous bands of hunter-gatherers widely distributed through the wilderness, we began inventing stories - to organize for survival, to find purpose and meaning, to explain the unfathomable. Ultimately these became the basis for empires, civilizations, and cultures. And when various narratives began to collide and overlap, the encounters produced everything from confusion, chaos, and war to cultural efflorescence, religious awakenings, and intellectual breakthroughs.
Through vivid stories studded with insights, Tamim Ansary illuminates the world-historical consequences of the unique human capacity to invent and communicate abstract ideas. In doing so, he also explains our ever-more-intertwined present: the narratives now shaping us, the reasons we still battle one another, and the future we may yet create.
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Compelling and infuriating take at World History
- By Skeptical on 09-11-11
By: Ian Morris
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A History of the World
- By: Andrew Marr
- Narrated by: Andrew Marr, David Timson
- Length: 26 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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From the earliest civilizations to the 21st century: a global journey through human history, published alongside a landmark BBC One television series. Our understanding of world history is changing, as new discoveries are made on all the continents and old prejudices are being challenged. In this truly global journey, Andrew Marr revisits some of the traditional epic stories, from classical Greece and Rome to the rise of Napoleon, but surrounds them with less familiar material, from Peru to the Ukraine, China to the Caribbean.
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25 hours of enjoyment
- By Mark on 04-26-13
By: Andrew Marr
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Destiny Disrupted
- A History of the World through Islamic Eyes
- By: Tamim Ansary
- Narrated by: Tamim Ansary
- Length: 17 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Until about 1800, the West and the Islamic realm were like two adjacent, parallel universes, each assuming itself to be the center of the world while ignoring the other. As Europeans colonized the globe, the two world histories intersected and the Western narrative drove the other one under. The West hardly noticed, but the Islamic world found the encounter profoundly disrupting.
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A history of the world before the West mattered
- By David on 05-05-14
By: Tamim Ansary
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India
- A Captivating Guide to the History of India, the East India Company and Dutch East India Company
- By: Captivating History
- Narrated by: Randy Whitlow
- Length: 6 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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This three-in-one audiobook includes three books on the captivating history of India. The first book covers the history of India from the ancient times to the modern era. The second book focuses on the East India Company, and the third book is about the Dutch East India Company. Learn more about India with this audiobook.
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Outstanding
- By Willow on 05-11-20
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History of Europe
- A Captivating Guide to European History, Classical Antiquity, The Middle Ages, The Renaissance and Early Modern Europe
- By: Captivating History
- Narrated by: Richard L. Walton
- Length: 15 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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If you want to discover the captivating history of Europe, then this audiobook might be what you're looking for. It includes five books that cover topics like ancient history, influence of ancient Greece and Rome, fall of the Roman Empire, the Renaissance, important events, and much more.
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fake reviews?
- By Natalie on 09-09-22
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Civilization
- The West and the Rest
- By: Niall Ferguson
- Narrated by: Niall Ferguson
- Length: 13 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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The rise to global predominance of Western civilization is the single most important historical phenomenon of the past five hundred years. All over the world, an astonishing proportion of people now work for Western-style companies, study at Western-style universities, vote for Western-style governments, take Western medicines, wear Western clothes, and even work Western hours. Yet six hundred years ago the petty kingdoms of Western Europe seemed unlikely to achieve much more than perpetual internecine warfare. It was Ming China or Ottoman Turkey that had the look of world civilizations.
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Thoughtful analysis of the ascendancy of the West.
- By Patrick on 05-25-13
By: Niall Ferguson
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The Good Kings
- Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt and the Modern World
- By: Kara Cooney
- Narrated by: Kara Cooney
- Length: 12 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Written in the tradition of historians like Stacy Schiff and Amanda Foreman who find modern lessons in ancient history, this provocative narrative explores the lives of five remarkable pharaohs who ruled Egypt with absolute power, shining a new light on the country's 3,000-year empire and its meaning today.
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Ancient Egypt as Metaphor for the Trump Administration
- By Orlando R. Murgado on 12-09-21
By: Kara Cooney
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The Invention of Sicily
- A Mediterranean History
- By: Jamie Mackay
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 7 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Sicily has always acted as a gateway between Europe and the rest of the world. Fought over by the Phoenicians and Greeks, the Romans, Goths and Byzantines, Arabs and Normans, Germans, and the Spanish and the French for thousands of years, Sicily became a unique melting pot where diverse traditions merged, producing a unique heritage and singular culture. In this fascinating account of the island from the earliest times to the present day, author and journalist Jamie Mackay leads us through this most elusive of places.
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Wonderful overview of Sicily
- By jay lazier on 01-28-24
By: Jamie Mackay
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Millennium
- From Religion to Revolution: How Civilization Has Changed over a Thousand Years
- By: Ian Mortimer
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 15 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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In Millennium, best-selling historian Ian Mortimer takes the listener on a whirlwind tour of the last 10 centuries of Western history. It is a journey into a past vividly brought to life and bursting with ideas, that pits one century against another in his quest to measure which century saw the greatest change. We journey from a time when there was a fair chance of your village being burned to the ground by invaders - and dried human dung was a recommended cure for cancer - to a world in which explorers sailed into the unknown and civilizations came into conflict.
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Bad ending - literally
- By John Gordon on 12-14-16
By: Ian Mortimer
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Very enlightening read
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Essential Book. Audible needs to re-edit
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Leave out the politics please
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Stay Sane in an Insane World
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Good book, However, prejudice shows through a bit
- By Don Dotson on 08-22-23
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Games Without Rules
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Very enlightening read
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Essential Book. Audible needs to re-edit
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By the end of on average day in the early 21st century, human beings searching the Internet will amass eight trillion gigabytes of data. This staggering amount of information - unprecedented in history - can tell us a great deal about who we are - the fears, desires, and behaviors that drive us, and the conscious and unconscious decisions we make. From the profound to the mundane, we can gain astonishing knowledge about the human psyche that less than 20 years ago seemed unfathomable.
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Leave out the politics please
- By Shane Hampson on 02-20-20
By: Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, and others
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White Jade
- International Intrigue, Terrorist Acts, and the Threat of Nuclear War! (The Project, Book 1)
- By: Alex Lukeman
- Narrated by: Jack de Golia
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White Jade is a high-octane thriller that catapults you into a world where danger lurks at every corner and trust is a luxury few can afford. Meet Nick Carter—ex-recon marine with a harrowing past. Now an elite operative for the PROJECT, a covert counterterrorism unit answering only to the president, Nick is no stranger to high-stakes missions. But when Selena Connor enters his life, the stakes get personal.
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Champions aren’t born. They’re built. Greg Harden spent over 30 years building them at the University of Michigan, including 400 future professional athletes, 50 NFL first-round draft picks, and 120 Olympians from over 20 countries. He gained national recognition when 60 Minutes Sports profiled him as “Michigan’s Secret Weapon.” Now, in his first book, Greg Harden is reaching out to help anyone who wants to live their best life by offering powerful and practical advice.
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Good book, However, prejudice shows through a bit
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Arabs
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This kaleidoscopic book covers almost 3,000 years of Arab history and shines a light on the footloose Arab peoples and tribes who conquered lands and disseminated their language and culture over vast distances. Tracing this process to the origins of the Arabic language, rather than the advent of Islam, Tim Mackintosh-Smith begins his narrative more than a thousand years before Muhammad and focuses on how Arabic, both spoken and written, has functioned as a vital source of shared cultural identity over the millennia.
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Good book bad narration
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Nonzero
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At the beginning of Nonzero, Robert Wright sets out to "define the arrow of the history of life, from the primordial soup to the World Wide Web." Twenty-two chapters later, after a sweeping and vivid narrative of the human past, he has succeeded and has mounted a powerful challenge to the conventional view that evolution and human history are aimless.
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Non-Zero (but pretty close to zero)
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A History of the World
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From the earliest civilizations to the 21st century: a global journey through human history, published alongside a landmark BBC One television series. Our understanding of world history is changing, as new discoveries are made on all the continents and old prejudices are being challenged. In this truly global journey, Andrew Marr revisits some of the traditional epic stories, from classical Greece and Rome to the rise of Napoleon, but surrounds them with less familiar material, from Peru to the Ukraine, China to the Caribbean.
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25 hours of enjoyment
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By: Andrew Marr
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The Dawn of Everything
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- Unabridged
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A trailblazing account of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the emergence of "the state", political violence, and social inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.
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exactly what I've been looking for
- By DankTurtle on 11-10-21
By: David Graeber, and others
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Politics
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The title Politics literally means ‘the things concerning the city’. Here, Aristotle considers the important role that politics plays in the life of the community and its contribution to harmonious and virtuous existence. It is divided into eight books and was a cornerstone in political philosophy for centuries despite certain features - including attitudes towards slaves and women - clearly placing its conclusions and advice within the confines of Athenian society of the fourth century BCE.
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I suspect a poor translation
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By: Aristotle
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Muhammad
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From the best-selling author of Islam: A Short History comes an important addition to the Eminent Lives book series. A former Roman Catholic nun and winner of a Muslim Public Affairs Council Media Award, Karen Armstrong shows how Muhammad's life can teach us a great deal about our world. More is known about Muhammad than any other major religion founder, yet he remains mysterious.
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down to the man
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By: Karen Armstrong
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Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia
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Pirates have long lived in the realm of romance and fantasy, symbolizing risk, lawlessness, and radical visions of freedom. But at the root of this mythology is a rich history of pirate societies—vibrant, imaginative experiments in self-governance and alternative social formations at the edges of the European empire.
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A fun historical analysis of Pirate political systems
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A People’s History of the World
- From the Stone Age to the New Millennium
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Chris Harman describes the shape and course of human history as a narrative of ordinary people forming and re-forming complex societies in pursuit of common human goals. Interacting with the forces of technological change as well as the impact of powerful individuals and revolutionary ideas, these societies have engendered events familiar to every schoolchild-from the empires of antiquity to the world wars of the 20th century. In a bravura conclusion, Chris Harman exposes the reductive complacency of contemporary capitalism.
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Oh God avoid
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By: Chris Harman
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The Secret History of the World
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Here, for the first time, is a complete history of the world based on the beliefs and writings of secret societies, researched with the help of an initiate of more than one secret society.
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Not for beginners
- By Being of Light on 09-13-12
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In Search of the Dark Ages
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In Search of the Dark Ages is an unrivalled exploration of the origins of English identity, and the best-selling book that established Michael Wood as one of Britain's leading historians. Now, on the book's 40th anniversary, this fully revised and expanded edition illuminates further the fascinating and mysterious centuries between the Romans and the Norman Conquest.
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Brilliant!
- By Dee Goulet on 08-31-22
By: Michael Wood
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Disunited Nations
- The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World
- By: Peter Zeihan
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- Unabridged
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In Disunited Nations, geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan presents a series of counterintuitive arguments about the future of a world where trade agreements are coming apart and international institutions are losing their power. Germany will decline as the most powerful country in Europe, with France taking its place. Every country should prepare for the collapse of China, not North Korea. We are already seeing, as Zeihan predicts, a shift in outlook on the Middle East: it is no longer Iran that is the region’s most dangerous threat, but Saudi Arabia.
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brilliant geopolitical primer re the future
- By Howard on 04-11-20
By: Peter Zeihan
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The Managerial Revolution
- What Is Happening in the World
- By: James Burnham
- Narrated by: Keith Hahn
- Length: 10 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Written in 1941, this is the book that theorized how the world was moving into the hands of the "managers". Burnham explains how capitalism had virtually lost its control, and would be displaced not by labour, nor by socialism, but by the rule of administrators in business and in government.
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Horrendous narrator
- By Trick009 on 04-30-22
By: James Burnham
What listeners say about The Invention of Yesterday
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Joe Light
- 07-10-23
Great for fans of Dawkins or Harari
What can I say… I thoroughly enjoyed the authors overview of human history. His narration was clear and inflection was lovely.
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- Steveclang
- 01-06-24
Very well done.
This was an excellent brief overview of human history, focused on the inter-relationships between cultures, civilizations, and time.
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- wbiro
- 09-19-24
Good Solid General History
And a lot of it. This book was also refreshing for me, allowing me to spend time with reality after having suffered through a few books that were steady streams of BS (motivational books making false claims). So my suggestion is, to fully appreciate this book, torture yourself with a motivational book or two first...
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- Eric Kasum
- 06-05-22
Best world history I've ever read
I have read many history books. Almost always they are written from the European or American point of view, as if nothing else mattered. Rarely do they describe Native American history, or Chinese, or Muslim, or African, even though their histories are rich, eloquent, and wonderful. I learned a lot. Tamim Ansary has many insights. Most of all, this book offers us a new pair of glasses. Once you put them on, the whole world looks different.
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- K. G.
- 11-01-22
Excellent and incredibly approachable project
I thoroughly enjoyed this and have already listened to many parts a second time. I think that if you are coming to it with a desire to understand what it means to shape a story of our history it is especially rewarding. The reading is very even and i was able to stay totally engaged without feeling like it lost intonation or became I engaging.
I heard an interview with the author that really convinced me of the importance and necessity of try to tell a story for this moment of our past that empowers us to think at the scale of the global - but with an understanding of our deep common history. I love that he did it with true grace and am very inspired.
Highly recommend for those who feel intimidated by history - I feel like this gives me a handle on so much by telling even the history I knew from a different point of view that will empower my curiosity moving forward towards so much that I both was familiar with or had never heard.
I am very grateful to the author for caring so much for our common history, and his peaceful and humanitarian desire truly touched me through this reading.
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- Amazon Customer
- 09-30-23
Amazing
Amazing book. Great overview of history of civilizations, with interesting concepts and facts, and story. The author is a real intellectual, not a ideologically driven academic
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- Justin Malzac
- 01-02-23
A New Perspective of World History
It is no secret that I love the work of Yuval Noah Harari. In this complex work, Tamim Ansary proves himself an equal. Whereas Harari’s seminal work, SAPIENS, focused on the ability of humans to utilize abstract concepts to create new communities, Ansary focuses on who these communities were (which he calls “constellations”) and the grand ideas that unified them. As such, the book starts as an anthropological work, examining human mental capacity and cultural development. But soon, it becomes a world history, but one focusing on ideas rather than events. Ansary shows how a common idea—whether that be religious, philosophical, or social—created a unified identity among certain people and led to political change. Such ideas include the deification of leaders in ancient Mesopotamia, Chinese Legalism, the rise of Christianity, the progress narrative of the enlightenment era, and Marxism. For each concept, he connects the development of the grand narrative to what he calls the “Ms”: Money, Math, Messaging, Management, and Might. These components are what sustain an empire, but cannot survive without a unifying narrative. The book ends by touching briefly on the machine age, the world wars, and post-nation state period into which we are emerging. The book is written with skill, and Ansary narrates the audiobook himself. That he sounds like my late grandfather’s lost twin is a sentimental bonus.
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- Faisal
- 06-23-21
Loved it!
What can I say, I have been fascinated by Tamim Ansary's writings since reading and listening to his book Destiny Disrupted. I would read anything by him. Again style of writing so beautiful it feels like you are reading not a history book but a storybook. Narration is great too. Amazing all around.
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- Taren Blackwing
- 02-04-20
Wonderful!
Tamim Ansary writes with deep insight, compassion, and wit. His understanding of the interconnected patterns of humanity is profound—even the topics about which I thought I knew something were given richer meaning by his unputdownable storytelling.
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- shoshidge
- 09-14-21
good stuff
Ansary is a good writer and narrator, I enjoyed this broad recap of the history of everything.
one of Ansary's best attributes is his ability to convey historical perspectives from a non eurocentric angle to English speakers.
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