BIG history

These sound like potentially fascinating books. Have you read any of them? No? Yes? If so, what did you think?

Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History
by David Christian
Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past
by Patrick Manning
The Ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia--A Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy
by Robert D. Kaplan
Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature
by William Cronon
Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation
by Jonathan Lear

The first book, Maps of Time, turns out to be the seminal work in a whole school of historical study of which I was completely and inexplicably unaware, called “big history” or “world history.” Not your high school social studies teacher’s world history, either. My sister’s partner is a student of the afore-mentioned David Christian, movement founder. (So that’s—let’s see—three degrees of separation?) Turns out Jared Diamond is arguably the best-known popularizer of the approach, although not, of course, an historian. And it seems to me that The Clock of the Long Now project also fits right in to this very big picture.

I can’t help but feel there is amazing, breathtaking, groundbreaking, though-provoking work going on around the globe. Everywhere.

That’s on my good days—but then, most of them are good.


p.s. Yes, yes, OK, I've ordered the first volume of Endgame by Derrick Jensen. It remains to be seen if I possess the, er, necessary fortitude to actually read it, and not employ it with other very large depressing books (such as anything by Laurie Garrett) as an impromptu flower press/end table/door stop.