Starred review from March 20, 2023
Violence, treachery, and sex are the motors of history in this sweeping chronicle. Historian and novelist Montefiore (The Romanovs) surveys wars, massacres, revolutions, plagues, famine, and socioeconomic transformations from the rise of the Mesopotamian city states to the Biden administration, giving China, India, Africa, central Asia, and pre-Columbian America as much space as the West. Focusing on ruling dynasties and their dysfunctions, Montefiore notes that the Ottoman Empire’s official succession procedure included royal sons killing each other off, and that the future Frederick the Great of Prussia was forced by his father to watch the beheading of his best friend for their presumed homosexual affair. Montefiore makes women central to the story, as queens and regents or as mothers and mistresses manipulating feckless kings. (They also hold their own in mayhem: the seventh-century Chinese royal concubine Miss Wu allegedly broke up Emperor Gaozong’s marriage by killing her own infant daughter and framing the Empress for murder.) And there’s plenty of sex, with the orgies of Rodrigo Borgia—aka Pope Alexander VI—perhaps taking the prize for debauchery. Setting a whirlwind pace, Montefiore skillfully guides readers through the tumult with elegant prose and evocative character sketches. It’s a bravura performance.
Starred review from April 1, 2023
How family dynamics have shaped the world. Award-winning historian Montefiore draws on 30 years of research, reading, and travel to create a panoramic, abundantly populated, richly detailed history of the world through the stories of families across place and time. History, he asserts, started when "war, food and writing coalesced to allow a potentate" to harness power and promote his or her children to keep it. That lust for power often involved violence, and promoting a child sometimes meant doing away with another. A family's aspirations frequently tested loyalty. Arranged chronologically into 23 Acts, beginning in prehistory, the blood-soaked narrative abounds with murder and incest, war and torture, enslavement and oppression. The author identifies the Mesopotamian leader Sargon as head of "the first power family." As his domain thrived, it proved fragile, an example, Montefiore claims, of "the paradox of empire"--the richer it became, the more its borders had to be defended against rivalrous incursions and "the greater was the incentive for destructive family feuds." In 2193 B.C.E., Sargon lost his empire. Roughly 1,000 years later, in China, the warrior king Wuding tried to shore up his own empire by placing each of his 64 wives in control of his conquered fiefdoms. Marriages--even between siblings or other close relations--proved helpful, and if alliances frayed, there was always exile, imprisonment, and murder. Pregnancies also were helpful, even if they resulted from rape. Some families that Montefiore examines are familiar to most readers--Medici, Bonaparte, Romanov, Habsburg, and Rockefeller--but Montefiore's view is capacious, as he recounts the histories of Chinese, Indian, Middle Eastern, Hawaiian, and African dynasties as well as the more recent Bushes, Kennedys, Castros, and Kims. The history of humanity, the author ably demonstrates, displays "cruelty upon cruelty, folly upon folly, eruptions, massacres, famines, pandemics, and pollutions"--yet throughout, he adds, an enduring capacity to create and love. A vibrant, masterful rendering of human history.
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May 1, 2023
A multi-award-winning historian who frequently focuses on Russia and the Middle East, Montefiore expands his purview to examine the will to power in great dynasties across human history. His subjects range from Mesopotamian cupbearer Sargon, who led an army dethroning his own king, to Ewuare, oba of the Benin Empire in the 1400s, and Hapsburg empress Maria Theresa.
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