Books : 1688: A Global History
|
|
In association with Amazon.com
|
by: John E., Jr. Wills
List Price: $16.95Amazon.com's Price: $11.53 You Save: $5.42 (32%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 909
EAN: 9780393322781
ISBN: 0393322785
Label: W. W. Norton & Company
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 352
Publication Date: 2002-01
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Sales Rank: 182593
Studio: W. W. Norton & Company
Related Items:
Editorial Review:
Product Description:
John E. Wills's masterful history ushers us into the worlds of 1688, from the suicidal exaltation of Russian Old Believers to the ravishing voice of the haiku poet Basho¯. Witness the splendor of the Chinese imperial court as the Kangxi emperor publicly mourns the death of his grandmother and shrewdly consolidates his power. Join the great caravans of Muslims on their annual pilgrimage from Damascus and Cairo to Mecca. Walk the pungent streets of Amsterdam and enter the Rasp House, where vagrants, beggars, and petty criminals labored to produce powdered brazilwood for the dyeworks. Through these stories and many others, Wills paints a detailed picture of how the global connections of power, money, and belief were beginning to lend the world its modern form.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Interesting and broad coverage
John Wills has done a good job of presenting the whole world as it was in 1688. The coverage is necessarily incomplete--if Wills had identified every culture and conflict alive in that year there'd have been only a sentence on each. It's thorough even so, and by 1688 the world was truly a global network: the Spanish mining silver in Bolivia; the Dutch bloodily extracting spices from the Indonesian archipelagoes; the British making their first military probes into India. The Tsar of Russia visited ... Read More
Rating: - Great book for world history classes
John Willis sought to accomplish one goal: an overview of world history for a single year. He accomplishes this in a very readable book. It can be a good corrective or complement to a narrower, traditional Anglocentric/Eurocentric presentation of history. Unfortunately the subject also makes it easy to criticize the book for being incomplete, or disconnected. But I can't imagine this book being written before the internet. In the past, it would require a large staff of ployglot librarians to tackle such ... Read More
Rating: - Very Good
The book is not perfect. I do not think the chapters are linked together in an effective way and at times the author has to spend too much of his time on background information of the period and not enough time on the actual year in focus. In the end these are minor problems. The sections when taken individually are excellent and I did like the quality of the writing., I even found wondering if there was going to be a 1689 or 1707.
Rating:  - A Bit Lightweight
I will admit that the author covers a lot of ground in this book, in which he conducts a general survey of events and notable personages as of 1688. If that date is recognizable to the general public, it would be for England's Glorious Revolution, in which James II was deposed in favor of William of Orange from Holland. Obviously, though, there was quite a lot more going on across the globe, and the author hopscotches about to touch on various affairs here and there and to highlight sundry people of interest, ... Read More
Rating:  - "the sketch and the anectdote" woven into world history
John Wills takes a unique approach to writing global history by focusing on the world in a single year. More accurately, this is a history of the late 17th century in which the year 1688 serves as nexus, and justifies bringing together stories that he "stumbled across" while researching European-Chinese relations. The result is a somewhat personal and idiosyncratic, but very entertaining, book. He does not engage in extensive analysis, preferring the sketch and the anecdote to the Grand Narrative. The notions ... Read More
|
|
|
