The World

A Family History of Humanity

By: Simon Sebag Montefiore

Narrated by: Simon Sebag Montefiore, full cast

Length: 68 hrs and 9 mins

Publisher's summary

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A magisterial world history unlike any other that tells the story of humanity through the one thing we all have in common: families • From the author of The Romanovs

A Best Book of the Year: The New Yorker, Smithsonian

“Succession meets Game of Thrones.”—The Spectator • “The author brings his cast of dynastic titans, rogues and psychopaths to life...An epic that both entertains and informs.”—The Economist, Best Books of the Year

Around 950,000 years ago, a family of five walked along the beach and left behind the oldest family footprints ever discovered. For award-winning historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, these poignant, familiar fossils serve as an inspiration for a new kind of world history, one that is genuinely global, spans all eras and all continents, and focuses on the family ties that connect every one of us.

In this epic, ever-surprising book, Montefiore chronicles the world’s great dynasties across human history through palace intrigues, love affairs, and family lives, linking grand themes of war, migration, plague, religion, and technology to the people at the heart of the human drama. 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. There is Hongwu, the beggar who founded the Ming dynasty; Ewuare, the Leopard-King of Benin; Henry Christophe, King of Haiti; Kamehameha, the conqueror of Hawaii; Zenobia, the Arab empress who defied Rome; Lady Murasaki, the first female novelist; Sayyida al-Hurra, the Moroccan pirate-queen. Here too are moderns such as Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, and Volodymyr Zelensky. Here are the Caesars, Medicis and Incas, Ottomans and Mughals, Bonapartes, Habsburgs and Zulus, Rothschilds, Rockefellers and Krupps, Churchills, Kennedys, Castros, Nehrus, Pahlavis and Kenyattas, Saudis, Kims and Assads. These powerful families represent the breadth of human endeavor, with bloody succession battles, treacherous conspiracies, and shocking megalomania alongside flourishing culture, moving romances, and enlightened benevolence. A dazzling achievement as spellbinding as fiction, The World captures the whole human story in a single, masterful narrative.

©2022 Simon Sebag Montefiore (P)2022 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

Named one of the Best Books of the Year by The New Yorker and The Economist • The Times (UK) History Book of the Year • a Smithsonian Magazine Best History Book of the Year • a Kirkus Best Nonfiction Book of the Year

“This is not the history you learned in school. . . . The World tells the story of humanity through families, be they large or small, powerful or weak, rich or poor. It is a book for people who want to read about people. . . . The World pulsates with the hundreds of human stories Mr. Montefiore brings to life in vivid, convincing fashion. . . . This is history as collective biography, a journey across almost two million years, from the appearance of Homo erectus in east Africa to the rise of Xi Jinping’s China. . . .”—The Wall Street Journal

“In his new book, Simon Sebag Montefiore traces the perilous and prescriptive power of ancestry through centuries riddled with rivalry, betrayal, and violence. . . . As the title suggests, [The World] approaches the sweep of world history through the family—or, to be more precise, through families in power. In the course of some thirteen hundred pages, The World offers a monumental survey of dynastic rule: how to get it, how to keep it, how to squander it. . . . The World has the heft and character of a dictionary. . . . Montefiore energetically fulfills his promise to write a ‘genuine world history, not unbalanced by excessive focus on Britain and Europe.’ In zesty sentences and lively vignettes, he captures the widening global circuits of people, commerce, and culture.”—The New Yorker

"Simon Sebag Montefiore knows how to keep our attention. Perhaps understanding that facing down 1,300 pages of human history might cause even the most committed reader to quail, he makes certain to pepper The World with enough inventive gore, twisted villainy, and seriously kinky sex to keep those pages turning. This book may be huge, but the author ensures it is thoroughly accessible. . . . Montefiore’s accomplishment here is nothing short of breathtaking. It is no mean feat to create a comprehensive timeline of human history that is deeply researched, illuminating, addictively compelling, and—quite simply—a rowdy good time.”—The Washington Independent Review of Books

Maybe worth another chance

I struggled to follow the book in audio format. I think this book would be excellent to read. Nonetheless, the chapters I did follow were enjoyable and informative.

Interesting, but not quite what I expected

An ambitious project. I appreciate that it discusses what is going on in different parts of the world at the same time. In terms of a “family history” though, I was kind of disappointed, it talks about the interrelatedness of important families… not so much about family life through history. It still felt a lot like wave after wave of names and dates.

Interesting - yes. Educational - yes. But, not really what I was hoping it would be.

Best to Let the Stories Wash Over You

I have mostly enjoyed the experience of listening to this book. It’s the first time I’ve listened to this kind of book: 62 hours of nonfiction encompassing so much time and so many people and places. As such, I can’t really judge it as history or even really understand how the approach of through the lens of the family would apply compared to another history of similar scope. At any rate I did enjoy letting thestories wash over me and I do feel more well-rounded in my general understanding of world history and some important interconnections. I liked the cast of various readers, though there was one whose cadence and rhythm was distractingly bad. Multiple times in any of their sections it seems as though a sentence is over only to be a poorly timed pause. Another narrator did well except for attempts at characterization of others which came off silly at times.

Iffy narration, lack of WhisperSync

I got the Kindle version to let me alternate between ear-reading and eye-reading. Unfortunately, WhisperSync seems not to have been enabled for this title. Better warning should be in order!
I found the team of narrators somewhat amateurish, and not up to the quality professional narration I'm used to. Pronunciation for many of the names of people and places often didn't match what I'd heard elsewhere. In some of the narrators, their accents made decoding difficult for me.
And a weird technical note: I have Phonak hearing aids to which the stream is originated in the Audible app on my Pixel 6. One of the Phonak features is that a double tap on the top of my ear will hang up a phone call or pause a stream. But on the Audible app, it silences the stream but fails to pause it. That makes recovering from a paused conversation tricky, because I have to manually back up to avoid missing all the text that silently played during the pause. Audiobooks on the "Smart Audiobook Player" correctly pause and resume from the pause point.

Gratuitous

Giving two stars because I appreciate the attempt at covering more cultures than most books. I am used to history books covering the awful ways that people tortured and killed one another many centuries or millennia ago, and offering details about people's sex lives that are somewhat shocking today. But this book goes farther than any other. I could only listen to about 20% of it before I'd had enough. There really is no need to go into such detail about methods of killing people or precisely what was done while raping underage slaves. Just gross.

Also, some of the narrators are terrible. They can't pronounce common words or they recite the text in a sing-song voice that is irritating.

Good book, poor performance

The idea was excellent: Multiple narrators, their names suggesting they come from different cultures. I had hoped this would solve a common problem with performances, which is mispronounciation.
Alas, all it produced is terrible mispronounciation in different voices, which is even more grating. And not only that, some of the performers are almost machine-like in their reading, unable to distinguish between punctuation marks.
Collectively, they spoil an excellent book. What a shame.

Great Story, Presentation Subpar

The story of course is excellent, the breadth is astounding. Equally astounding, in a very bad way, is the inability for some of the presenters to speak and pronounce English. And for one presenter in particular the pronunciations border on the comically bad. This is laugh out loud not funny. You can and must do better.

An excellent book, spoiled by very poor narration,

A sweeping history that fairly gallops; unfortunately the readers come close to ruin this audiobook.

Terrible Performance

This is one of the worst performances. I'd rather have one excellent reader than the multiple readers, but that would have been okay if some of the readers were not so bad.

I don't mind accents in fact I like it, but some of the readers mispronounce words so badly that it leaves me confused. Really annoying.

Overwhelming detail

I really enjoyed Montefiore's Romanovs and Jerusalem. This book, by contrast, failed in many ways. Each leader throughout the history of time that was focused on, was a person who took power because that is what he or she wanted, and he or she didn't necessarily know what to do with the power once they got it. Much of the detail on each powerful leader was about the leader's sexual perversions, or else they were morally perverse. There was so much material on sexual depravity in leaders I began to wonder if this history were based upon verifiable facts or whether these were myths or legends or even the author's proclivities. Because it is in audiobook form, there were no footnotes that one could read that might verify if the material was even factual.

While ostensibly based upon "families," it was more a history of the perversions that powerful people have, perhaps because when you are determined to be the most powerful person in the world, it might actually be that you have a need to control people in every way, including as sexual objects or fetishes. A person with a perversion is trying to solve a problem of feeling helpless by turning things upside down, so that they are the tormentor instead of the one being tormented.

But this was not meant to be a book on perversions or sadomasochism, but on families, the world's leaders and their families.

Some aspects of the book were extremely interesting. Montefiore is brilliant, but as a historian he did not show the needed objectivity and depth of research I have come to expect. I would say the weakest part of the book is the end.

When Montefiore describes Donald Trump as if he read the description from someone with Trump Derangement Syndrome or from reading the NY Times, you can tell Montefiore was so sure of himself that he didn't even bother to look beyond his political prejudices. It is kind of shocking to see someone I thought was truly dedicated to honest history just babble about Trump as if his only goal was to prove the man a joke. And his description of Obama made him out to be something akin to a saint. Again, this showed he just went with his political prejudices and didn't really examine the facts of each of these men and what they are about.

Montefiore can do better, but I think he must have taken on too much to really do the subject justice and the end was almost difficult to listen to it was so full of prejudice and so lacking in comprehension of what these men represented BOTH to their supporters AND their rivals.

As a result he did not really cover the degree to which our country is at the lowest point it has ever been in my 71 years on earth. That is truly astonishing to leave that out. Also he appears to have very little in depth understanding about US foreign policy from Jimmy Carter to the present, except for perhaps what he reads in the New York Times, which is a completely biased source of information.

If you want to know about perverse people throughout history and a woke account of the 21st century, you'll love this book.