Vit Rosenbaum

A brief story of humankind

Revisado: 01-10-21

Before I start the review, I will present my biases which, without question, influenced greatly my opinion of this book. I am 29 years old white upper class atheist male hailing from a Central European country that formerly was a part of the Eastern bloc. I have broad but rather superficial (high-school to undergraduate level) knowledge of world history, prehistory, philosophy, economics and political science. I am definitely not an expert in any of the topics that are presented in this book and thus cannot provide a scholarly critique, but only subjective opinion.

The biggest issue with this book is in my opinion that its title is somewhat misleading. While it is presented as a historical treatise, after a few dozen pages it becomes obvious that the book is not much more than a well organized story of the sapiens species. I therefore think that the title "A brief story of humankind" would be more appropriate.

The historical accuracy of the book can be best illustrated by author's claims such as Hammurabi's Code of Laws being issued in 1776 B.C. (1754 B.C. is historically more likely date), because that date simply looks good next to the Declaration of Independence that was issued in 1776 A.D., which is part of the same argument that the author makes at that point of the book. Similarly, the size of the army of British East India Company is overestimated by the author to 350 000, compared to 200 000+ given by other sources, probably because it is more sensational. Based on these two examples I believe that a person with a solid knowledge of world history (or merely a desire to do some fact checking) would be able to find many more occurrences of such inaccuracies.

The content of the story of humankind however more than makes up for its historical shortcomings. In his narrative, the author discusses the major changes in human thought that led humans to abandon their ancient ways and practices and produced the society we know today, with all its contradictions and issues. I especially appreciated how the author tried very hard to distance himself from expressing moral judgement of the different religions, ideologies and norms that different cultures adopted over time. The underlying tenets of polytheistic and monotheistic religions and ideologies such as Humanism or Capitalism are presented with as much indifference with respect to their possible moral implications as Nazism or Communism, or the issue of racism or destruction of other cultures by European invasion of Americas. This makes the author seem to want to present as much descriptive an account of human history as possible. I greatly appreciate this approach to such a sensitive subjects, although I understand that a lot of people will have a problem with it. Overall, the narrative is quite sensible and the arguments and explanation have a strong internal validity and are very hard to argue with.

There is one negative thing about the story however that caused me to knock one star off - the author's take on the Agricultural revolution. While the author is completely entitled to brand the agricultural revolution as the "history's biggest fraud" citing the evidence of higher quality of diets, lower occurrence of undernourishment and shorter working hours of hunter-gatherers in comparison with the early farmers, he does not give a sufficient reasoning behind why humans eventually abandoned hunting and gathering and adopted agriculture. If humans were better of as hunter-gatherers why would such a change even occur?

Furthermore, the reasoning behind the different quality of lives of hunter-gatherers and early farmers is based on rather flimsy speculations. For example the author claims that hunting and gathering was able to support much lower population per unit of territory, but there was no pressure coming from overpopulation, because, as the author claims, women tended to have lower reproduction due to biological constraints (being less fertile when amount of food is insufficient) and social constraints (being on the move + taking care of children intensively for many more years than in agricultural communities, thus having less time for reproductive duties) which resulted in lower rates of reproduction that in turn prevented overpopulation issues. Farming, on the other hand, led to a massive increase in reproduction rates although it simultaneously led (according to the author) to lower quality of diet and less available food, while the amount of time spent for work increased. This seems to me to be a clear contradiction as from the previous argument about hunter-gatherers one would assume that lower availability of food and longer working hours of agricultural communities would lead to even larger reduction in reproduction rate than the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

Unfortunately, the author does not see or choose to address this contradiction and his reasoning why humans chose to abandon the supposedly better hunter-gatherer lifestyle for the rather inefficient and back-breaking activity of farming is rather crudely dismissed by "It was the wheat that domesticated humans" kind of argument instead of spending more time on the topic and presenting some other, more plausible hypotheses.

That said, I recommend the book to basically anyone who is open-minded, does not mind his beliefs to be challenged and is interested in understanding of why the history unfolded in the way it did. Although you might not agree with all of the author's premises or conclusions on some topics, the book will certainly make you think about them and that's exactly what are such books for.

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Enjoyable, I recommend it for all GRRM fans.

Revisado: 10-15-20

It's just what it claims to be - a selection of stories by GRRM throughout his career. Some, especially the earlier ones are rather crude and dull, others (especially the later ones) are both entertaining and intriguing. Accordingly, the quality of writing varies as well.

The narration is excellent for the most part, though I prefer some narrators (namely Dotrice) to others.

The only (and extremely annoying) problem with this audiobook is that the chapters are not divided along the lines of the stories, but rather haphazardly, so good luck trying to find a concrete story to listen to. Frankly, I don't understand how someone can organize an audiobook in this way. I knock of one star precisely for that reason.

In terms of content, at the time of writing this review, the book description is incomplete, as the book contains one section beyond what's mentioned in the description - Section 7 focusing on stories from GRRM's later years (such as Hedge Knight, Portraits of His Children). This is a pleasant addition to the already formidable collection, but it would be a good idea to add it to the description, as these stories are of a very good quality as well and deserve to be advertised there.

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