The Human Story : Our History, From the Stone Age to Today - Vendido!

by James C. Davis
Hardcover: 480 pages
Publisher: HarperCollins; (June 29, 2004)

Rights Sold:
*** Fundamento - Brasil ***
NHK - Japan

Book description:
Has there ever been a history of the world as readable as this?
In The Human Story, James C. Davis takes us on a journey to ancient times, telling how peoples of the world settled down and founded cities, conquered neighbors, and established religions, and continues over the course of history, when they fought two nearly global wars and journeyed into space.
Davis’s account is swift and clear, never dull or dry. He lightens it with pungent anecdotes and witty quotes. Although this compact volume may not be hard to pick up, it’s definitely hard to put down.
For example, on the death of Alexander the Great, who in a decade had never lost a single battle, and who had staked out an empire that spanned the entire Near East and Egypt, Davis writes: "When they heard how ill he was, the king’s devoted troops insisted on seeing him. He couldn’t speak, but as his soldiers -- every one -- filed by in silence, Alexander’s eyes uttered his farewells. He died in June 323 B.C., at the ripe old age of thirty-two."
In similar fashion Davis recounts Russia’s triumph in the space race as it happened on an autumn night in 1957: "A bugle sounded, flames erupted, and with a roar like rolling thunder, Russia’s rocket lifted off. It bore aloft the earth’s first artificial satellite, a shiny sphere the size of a basketball. Its name was Sputnik, meaning ’companion’ or ’fellow traveler’ (through space). The watchers shouted, ’Off. She’s off. Our baby’s off!’ Some danced; others kissed and waved their arms."
Though we live in an age of many doubts, James C. Davis thinks we humans are advancing. As The Human Story ends, he concludes, "The world’s still cruel; that’s understood, / But once was worse. So far so good."


Quotes and Reviews:
Library Journal
September 15, 2004

Davis, James C. The Human Story Our History, From the Stone Age to Today
Davis (history, emeritus, Univ. of Pennsylvania) has performed a small miracle by writing a history of humanity in under 500 pages, beginning with Homo erectus and continuing up to the current war in Iraq. While the author surveys almost all of the major civilizations, some receive more extensive coverage than others. The focus is on Western civilization and the peoples—Greek, Roman, and Hebrew—who have contributed to its formation and development. Davis considers the major religions, as well as environmental factors such as disease, inventions such as the internal combustion engine and computer, and discoveries such as that of DNA. Given the scope of this ambitious work, it is not surprising that some topics are glossed over. Radio, motion pictures, and television do not receive the coverage they deserve, while fast food franchises receive perhaps too much coverage. On the whole, however, this volume would be useful for both students and casual readers. Recommended for academic and larger public libraries.

Tampa Tribune (Florida)
August 29, 2004 Sunday
Pick up your son or daughter’s high school world history textbook. Now take out the chapter guides, vocabulary words and section review questions. That’s what Davis, who taught history at the University of Pennsylvania for more than 30 years, gives as a capstone to his career. He delivers the history of the world using a narrative style that cannot override the book’s timeline feel. Davis swiftly chronicles man from prehistory through 2003. His anecdotes on such great historic figures as Alexander the Great and Hitler provide the charm a textbook leaves out. His themes of man’s ingenuity (scientific inquiry) and destructiveness (wars and genocides) allow him to reflect with insight after years studying the past.

Reviewed for The Tampa Tribune by Brian Ayres, a social studies teacher at Brandon High School.
----//----

Review in The Christian Science Monitor
July 27, 2004

Doomed to repeat it? Here’s a refresher
A colorful summary of everything that’s ever happened
By Gregory M. Lamb
On the final page of "The Human Story," James Davis squeezes all of history into just 16 clever lines of verse. Using "steam, vaccines, and votes," he writes, we yanked ourselves out of ignorance, disease, and poverty and set out to know the universe. We "sent men and mirrors as our eyes/ To search the black, galactic skies; And in our cells, till then unseen/ We found our Fates, our djinns: our genes." How do things stand at the dawn of the 21st century? "The world’s still cruel, that’s understood,/ But once was worse. So far so good."

That’s the conclusion of this informal, often lively, and always S-I-M-P-L-E short history of humanity. In some ways it’s a Reader’s Digest version of our past, or perhaps "World History for Dummies." Enough names, places, and dates are dished out to help if you’re playing "Trivial Pursuit." But not so many that it becomes an encyclopedia in disguise.

In fact, Davis constantly turns verbal backflips to keep his prose fresh and more entertaining than the junior high school textbook this could have become. Well-chosen anecdotes often bring the narrative alive. He tells an ancient male chauvinist joke written in Sumeria, the first known civilization, around 4000 BC: "My wife is at the shrine, my mother is down by the river," the man complains, "and here I am dying of hunger!" Or he reminds us that President Theodore Roosevelt’s robust policy in Central America can be summed up in a palindrome: "A MAN A PLAN A CANAL PANAMA." A single paragraph shows the dedication of workers at a seed bank in the Soviet Union during the siege of Stalingrad. They died of starvation at their desks, we learn, rather than eat the rare specimens of rice, peanuts, and grains kept in their charge.

But sometimes the images are strained: "The [communist] system often functioned badly," he says, "like an elephant that tries to waltz." Other times, he’s too florid, as when he describes personal computers as "fairy queens who flourished wands and changed the poorest Third World hamlets into glowing symbols of the dawning age."

Even when the passages clunk, however, Davis deserves credit for also displaying humor and craft. In a nutshell, (and what other way can you write a history of the world in under 500 pages?) he sums up the Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) strategy that kept the US and Soviet Union from plunging into a nuclear holocaust like this: "They learned instead to walk around each other on their toes, stiff-legged, sometimes snarling, never biting." Describing the biotech revolution, he quickly sketches, "In the decades after World War II our species crossed a line. Of course, as individual humans we didn’t change; we look and feel the way we did before. But as a species we achieved a previously undreamed of mastery of life."

A quote from a woman in Peru, the last speaker of an Indian dialect, symbolizes the loss of indigenous cultures around the world: "I dream in Chamicuro, but I cannot tell my dreams to anyone," she laments. "Some things cannot be said in Spanish. It’s lonely being last."

Davis takes a few stands on historical controversies. He treats Jesus as a legitimate and important figure, though it’s a minimalist view that will frustrate some readers. He finds absolutely no controversy in the United States dropping two atomic bombs on Japan, though many others have. Germans would like to think that few knew what was going on in the Nazi death camps, but he concludes that "everybody knew." And though World War II is often thought of as "the good war," he chillingly sums it up with a brief list of the horrible ways people died.

Interested teens will find "The Human Story" an easy read. Busy adults presumably will race through it for an executive summary of history, or thumb the index to track down a fact that eludes them. If you’re shaky on who were the early Indus people or exactly what were those poems and essays called the Upanishads that undergird modern Hinduism, here’s an instant refresher.

"In spite of all we hear and say, the world has been improving for a good long time," Davis comfortingly concludes. Or as he sums it up with just four words: "So far, so good."

• Gregory M. Lamb writes on healthcare policy and technology for the Monitor

From Publishers Weekly
Davis, who taught history at the University of Pennsylvania, has taken on an unusual project—to relate all of human history in the simplest terms possible for the broadest audience possible. The chapter titles illustrate his method of abstracting large themes from a multitude of events—"The richer countries grab the poorer," for example, isn’t a bad summary of 19th-century imperialism, but it does risk seeming remedial. At his best, Davis does for human history what Stephen Hawking did for the atom and the universe—take a step back from the details and translate them into common terms. But human history lacks the elegance of subatomic particles, so the book constantly flirts with a kind of riotous overgeneralization, treating immensely complex entities like "England" or "workers" as much as possible like single individuals in psychological terms. The method works better for events that are known widely but not in detail—an example is Stalin’s purges—for which Davis can bring the reader a smattering of pungent details and move on. For more familiar subjects, the reader may feel the author is being glib. Davis elevates thinkers above leaders, devoting far more space to Newton and Darwin than to Napoleon and Caesar. It is refreshing to have a treatment of human life at once learned and optimistic, and one that so forcefully focuses on the primacy of ideas in our triumphant story. 9 maps, 4 line illus.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Metahistories of humanity are in vogue. Davis’ offering marks at least the third gallop from the ice age to the atomic age to be published recently. Like Geoffrey Blainey (A Short History of the World, 2002) and Michael Cook (A Brief History of the Human Race [BKL S 15 03]), Davis is an academic historian reaching for a mass readership. And, like them, he adopts a plan to appeal to it by illustrating a general point with a human-interest example and using direct and simple sentences. However, there’s nothing simplistic about his prose style. Every average reader of Davis’ survey will likely have detailed familiarity with some subject and will sense that the author’s grasp of it (whether of the history of health, religions, or empires) reveals him to be a reliable pathfinder to the central facts and narrative of unfamiliar terrain as well. Regarding history as a progressive process overall, Davis’ reconnoitering of humanity’s record of depravity and enlightenment is a wise choice as an introduction to world history. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

"A brisk and cheerfully traditional trip through history, from Homo erectus to George W. Bush. - Kirkus

About the author:
James C. Davis taught history at the University of Pennsylvania for thirty-four years. He is the author of four other books, dealing with Venice, the early history of European nations, and the lives of peasants and blue-collar workers.