Michael Wood (1) (1948–)

There is something of a juvenile romantic in Michael Wood's Search. Its a joy to follow the informed speculations on Boadices, King Authur, Offa, Alfred the Great, Athelstan, Eric Bloodaxe, Ethelred the Unready, and William the Conquerer and their peoples. To bring them and their times back to life is a conjuring act of a magician. It is so interesting to see the materials an anthropologist, archaeologist, and historian have to work with and to make something of them. To see how these show more stories come to light and change over time adds spice to this whole field of inquiry.

Quotes: (page 18) “Was Prasutagas a puppet king set up by the Romans to further their interests in opposition to other branches of the royal family, perhaps after Antedos had been deposed or died? But most important of all, who was Boudica? We know she was Prasutugas' wife---but what was the ancestry and royal status which ( along with charismatic personality) enabled her to command such allegiance when the revolt broke out? These are all questions which probably can never be answered, but political-infighting between pro-Roman and anti-Roman tribes and groups should never be underestimated when dealing with these events. In the meantime only the full excavation of undoubted Iceni royal center could give us some answers to questions which we see present only though Roman eyes.”

( on Alfred the Great, page 125) “To embark upon such a systematic programme of instruction at such a time was the act of a remarkable man, practical, resolute, and ruthless he took on himself not only the strain of defense but also concern for the future lives of his subjects. That is why, alone among English kings, he is ' the Great', and why he has rightly never lost the esteem of the English-speaking world...He became a man who saved the essential Englishness of our culture and language.”

(page 145) “We can, explain the king's delay in moving north in terms other than idleness. We know from different sources how difficult it was to raise a large army unless the king traveled through his shires personally. Athelstan's agents will have told him the size of the invasion force, and he obviously took time to bring together as many West-Saxon and Mercian levies as he could. Unlike Harold in 1066 he was not lured into precipitate action as the news came of allied mounted columns devastating the crops, burning down houses and driving off refugees, with 'complaining rumour' everywhere.”

(page 213) “On 5 January 1066 Edward died in his new church at Westminster. The very next day, 'before the funeral meats were cold', Earl Harold seized the thrown and was crowned in the abbey. It was alleged by some that on his deathbed Edward had put his kingdom in Harold's protection, and the Bayeux Tapestry portrays such a scene. But the unseemly haste of the earl's consecration indicates the true nature of the changeover: an all-powerful dynasty, not of royal blood, had effectively usurped the throne of the Cerdicings. It was a coup d' etat carried off with great speed and purpose. When the news reached William he received it in silence, his face black with fury. A protest was immediately sent off to the English court asking for an explanation.” show less

A brilliantly told story of a spectacular nation and civilization. The author, who has produced documentaries and books on many major civilizations, including India's, has the rare ability of getting under the skin of his subjects,, and presenting them as an insider, almost. He is at his evocative best when he talks of the tragedy of loss in the collapse of successive regimes in China - especially the demise of the Han, the Tang, the Song, and the Ming, for instance. The sweeping survey of show more China's history reveals starkly this tragic quirk in this great civilization, that it destroys the best repeatedly even as it goes on to fashion itself anew. The question is, will this happen again in the current expression of its national genius. show less

This book is definitely wrongly titled. In fact, BBC journalist and trained historian Michael Wood (b. 1948) pays very little attention to the earliest civilizations (Mesopotamia, India, China, Egypt, Central America). He does take them as a starting point, but after a few pages he jumps over to the further history of the regions where those first civilizations occurred. And his main thesis, then, is that the basic features of those early civilizations also returned later, down to the show more present day. Of course, there’s something to it, but in doing this in such an extremist way, Wood ignores all the findings that have been highlighted by movements such as Global History, Transnational History, Connected and Subaltern History in recent decades. And that is that all civilizations and cultures have continuously influenced each other, in a mutual cross-fertilization, with very different accents and constant evolutions and shifts. Michael Wood apparently deliberately chooses to close his eyes to this, perhaps a consequence of the simplification of the TV format on which this book is based. Though this certainly is an enjoyable read, it is definitely outdated. More on that in my History account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1384596423 show less

This is my third reading of a general history of China. The other two being Odd Arne Westad's Restless Empire and Jonathon D Spences's The Search for Modern China. All three have their strengths. Wood's is epecially strong in the early empires; an area I usually avoid like the plague. Some might remember him from his PBS series on Alexander or on the Incas. His sense of the epic and how to tell its attending tales enriches and makes clearer those early years of China and their later effects. show more So, the first two thirds could be called lively and engaging with only the last part being pedestrian and not as fresh with the exception of a very wise conclusion. A solution to the pedestrian parts is to read the other noted histories.

Quotes: (page 198) “Nothing better illustrates the traditional Chinese reverence for the written word than the way Taizong went about the task of restoring the imperial library, which had been founded 1,000 years earlier. When his predecessor, his brother Taizu, came to the throne, there had been 12,000 scrolls in the imperial collection. Now, as Song rule expanded into the Yangtze valley in the 960s, though by no means a learned man himself, in the wake of his armies Taizong sent commissioners to towns and noble houses to save manuscripts, expanding the collection by four times. Then, in 976, Taizong built a new imperial library with a staff and directorate of books. He then instituted a nationwide search of books containing the lost learning of classical China. He told his librarians 'When we consider the old imperial library (from the Tang in 721, it listed 60,000 manuscripts) the loses have been great, a wide search is in order. We must look for the missing books; the message must be announced far and wide that if any government official has books we lack, he must bring them to the throne.'”

(page 478) “At the end of the 1950s, these misguided campaigns pushed China into the Great Famine. Recently, a period of relaxation in the opening of Chinese regional archives has revealed a flood of documentation right down to local party memos and even village petitions, and the broad picture, the scale of disaster across China, is now clear. Needless to say, the party did not leave an honest account of its own failures, constantly contradicting itself, rewriting the record, with lies, deception and self-delusion even in the face of a human disaster of such staggering proportions. But enough evidence is there to see that even if the party's figures are underestimates, this was the worst famine in Chinese history, Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng in his Tombstone-a book set beside Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago- estimates that 36 million people died. Others have put the figure higher still, which makes China's Great Famine by far the worst in human history.”

(page 539) “The Chinese intelligentsia has taken many blows since then, but despite the devastating attacks on civil society-even in the last few years-it has not been broken, and after thirty tumultuous years of the communist experiment, and the Reform and Opening Up period that followed, that hope remains. For China, there are still many paths to the future.” show less