History

“Knowing What We Know:The Transmission of Knowledge From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic” is a particularly ambitious work both for this professional writer, Simon Winchester, as it would be for any other author.

For me this history of knowledge from creation, through transmission to storage was a particularly compelling read. His background in Asian studies lends a surprising east-west balance in his account. The history, presented in a compelling and readable way, is the basis from which the author approaches his essential concern and question.

Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced and Stumbled our Way to Civilization, by University of British Columbia professor of philosophy, Edward Slingerland is a history demonstrating the positive contribution of alcoholic beverage to the growth of civilization. I could imagine this subject and the treatment in this book having a broader appeal than most non-fiction.

Margaret MacMillan's “War; How Conflict Shaped Us” is an extraordinarily information dense 270 pages.

That wars are good for us is a more likely conclusion for this book than the hackneyed 'war is hell'. While the Canadian historian doesn't say it is more one than the other, she gives space to both, but seems to favour that it has ultimately been more beneficial, at least the way it has played out so far with the technology available.

'The Future is Asian' by Parag Khanna is a comprehensive book reflecting the size and complexity of Asia and how inclusive he is in portraying it. The Arctic, Israel, Japan and Australia/New Zealand are on the margins of Khanna's Asia.

I would put this book in the top half dozen of the best in the last 100 I have read. Without excusing 'bad behaviour in western eyes' the author tries, and succeeds to a large extent, to explain it, and the characters involved, in an illuminating way.

The book ’Chasing a Mirage;The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State'’ by Tarek Fatah is about the illusion that Islamists have of replicating the golden age of Islam (800-1350 AD) with an Islamic state.

The dour homogeneity exuded by Wahhabism is the antithesis of the energy and diversity that reigned during the best periods of that golden age.

While the form of government developed in that period served those times, it lacked key features of transition of leadership and political institutions that would have allowed it to evolve.

‘The Prehistory of the Mind:the Cognitive origins of Art Religion and Science’ by Steven Mithen deals with the evolution of the human mind from the common ancestor with the apes six million years ago to the most modern humans who appeared sometime between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago.

The author is a British archaeologist.