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.

War since the beginning of man.

We have been fighting one another since beginning of mankind. Families for power and land. Cruelty, deceit, murder

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.

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.

Awful Narration

I’ve listened to a lot of audiobooks, and this one, by far, is the worst performance I have ever heard. It sounds as if it’s computer generated.

I just can’t believe this was considered acceptable.

The promise is not fullfilled.

I loved the idea of history through the lense of family but this sadly does not deliver. on top of this, the scope of the book and its relatively small size leaves the listener with a tiktok version of history. If your attention span lasts 30 seconds perhaps its for you. Lastly, the book has censored sections. I am returning the title half way through on principal. I expect to listen to a complete, unedited version of the text.

Really hard to follow as an audiobook

This book attempts to put story behind the names and dates of history, which does help the reader remember and understand what was happening when. But the scope remains so huge and sweeping that it's hard to really digest and comprehend the people and their contexts.

The audio performance made it very, very hard to follow. I appreciate the attempt to have different readers with different accents but there is no cohesion or quality check. Names are not pronounced consistently from chapter to chapter and since you don't have the written spelling to reference it's hard to know whether this is a person you've already heard about or somebody entirely new. Some of the worst pronunciations were ones that could have easily been standardized by good directing; the first reader who had Chinese names to pronounce was all over the place, rhyming Shang and Yang with the English "bang". They more accurately rhyme with "wrong." But this reader did pronounce Shi Huang Di more accurately, proving that they were able to pronounce those sounds, they just didn't bother to check what Chinese orthography was like before starting. And then a few chapters later, one of the readers was obviously a bilingual speaker of Mandarin and English and the pronunciations were spot on; why couldn't there have been coordination between this reader and the others who had chapters with Chinese places and names? And that's just a language I know a bit about; who knows how consistent the Persian or Arabic or Greek names were.

And please for the love of all that's holy to the person who talked about Teotihuacan: you were almost there. Just Google it. There is no language in which it would be pronounced "tay-oh-tee-wah-KWAN." I would have preferred a super gringo interpretation of it to whatever that was.

Disappointed

Woke history of the world. History viewed in thru a modern narrow sociopolitical lens. Too bad a woman of color didn’t write it.