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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. ...
