The World: A Family History

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Just because we are the smartest ape ever created, just because we have solved many problems so far, it does not mean we will solve everything. SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE is a historian of Russia and the Middle East whose books are published in more than forty languages. Here are not just conquerors and queens but prophets, charlatans, actors, gangsters, artists, scientists, doctors, tycoons, lovers, wives, husbands and children.

The premise is ostensibly about family, but it’s really an accounting of power, violence, and conquest not dissimilar from other books. It features a cast of extraordinary diversity: in addition to rulers and conquerors, there are priests, charlatans, artists, scientists, tycoons, gangsters, lovers, husbands, wives and children.However, without those citations, we are left entirely dependent upon Montefiore’s authority and accuracy.

The great changes are matters of magnitude, but that too is a chastening thought: "Scale matters in the World Game, but one thing is certain: whoever wins will not win for long.

Not unexpectedly, there are periodic lapses in the text, some of them the responsibility of editors (imagine being given this to edit! The story is told through their interconnected world and often changes viewpoints from across the world in a broadly chronological format. Sifting through so many power struggles and shifting dynasties, Montefiore eschews ideologies of history, which "rarely survive contact with the messiness, nuance and complexity of real life," taking as his one consistent thread the role of families. Any section that piques your interest should be followed up by finding other books that go in depth.

Besides the award-winning “Stalin: The Court of The Red Tsar” and “Jerusalem: The Biography”, he is also the author of “Written in History: Letters That Changed the World and Voices of History: Speeches That Changed the World”. Thus, it’s a tale of sex and violence; rather like reading a long historical novel with far too many characters, no coherent plot, and no neat beginning or end. Yet I wonder at their purpose and find no convincing answer to the question of what has been gained by the successful completion of the exercise.the Soviet march on Berlin, nightmarish drinking games at Stalin's countryhouse, the magnificence of the Bolshoi, interrogations, snow, sex and exile. to ”After [Andonilos] had been hung upside down in the Hippodrome, his eyes were gouged out, his genitals amputated, his teeth extracted, his face burned. But families, he shows, are at least likely to be self-destructive as bonding, and the narrative often seems to be a string of tales of astonishing cruelty and bloodshed, epitomized by Tamerlane's towers of skulls of the beheaded.