A History of Knowledge: Past, Present, and Future

Normally I would have written this off early in the book. 25 year old book written by a white American male who considers those three attributes to be the marks of culture. The world need only become more like white American males to perfect itself. However, the reason I have this book is that 5 years ago my son was assigned it as a textbook! And the further I got into the book, the more I read his opinions (that he considers to be knowledge) about the then present on into the future, the more horrified I became.
His comment on one major challenge the world was facing when he wrote was "It is not pleasant to have to mention such a possibility. Let us therefore assume it will not happen."
A lot of his 'facts' and 'knowledge' are show more dangerous because he can't tell the difference between his own opinions and reality.
As far as his ideas about the future go, they are the proof that this book is way over its use-by-date.
I can't believe this is still in print. show less

Though I genuinely enjoyed the book, I feel obliged to highlight couple of glaring factual mistakes I detected. They both deal with Russia and as a Russian I could not pass them unnoticed. The Russo-Japanese War was started by Japan with a surprising attack. The author states opposite.

Next, he confuses Belorussians (literally "White Russians") with White Guards, who fought Reds in the Russian Civil War and had mostly nothing in common with these people, apart from sounding alike to a certain degree. To me it sounds liek a hilarious, pun-like joke, but for many foreign readers out there, who are not familiar with the topic it may serve as a misleading information.

An overview of human knowledge that, despite its relative conciseness, manages to serve as a source of inspiration for additional reading and rereading. If nothing else, this is a reference work well worth consulting for ideas on the salient features of the centuries' worth of advances in human knowledge.

While slightly fusty by modern 'literary non-fiction' standards, this book has been a beginner history/philosophy student stand-by for a long time. Not the type of book you read from cover to cover in one sitting, but worth having on the shelf for reference value

While "history" books cannot elide the grim determinism of the past upon the present, few historians are as express about the links between our present and the present, and how our present is already fixing the future.

The author was an editor of Encyclopaedia Brtiannica for 20 years.
The book is divided into 15 chapters. That division is explained in the outline of the book presented in the "Author to Reader" section.

1. Wisdom of Ancients
2. Greek Explosion
3. What Romans Knew
4. Light in the Dark Ages
5. Middle Ages: Great Experiment.
6. Reborn in the Renaissance.
7. Europe Reaches Out.
8. Invention of Scientific Method.
9. Age of Revolutions
10. Nineteeth Century: Prelude
11. World in 1914
12. Twentieth C.: Triumph of Democracy
13. Twentieth C: show more Science and Technology
14. Twentieth C: Art and Media
15. Next Hundred Years show less

Visionary text combining the literature and history of all ages to propose what we should do in the future.

12/16/21