A WORLD HISTORY

William H. McNeill's The Rise of the West is perhaps the most lucid and intelligent one-volume presentation of world history in narrative form ever written. Winner of the National Book Award in History and Biography in 1964, it is surely one of the most scholarly and exciting histories of our times. The reader expecting something dramatically new in McNeill's A World History will be disappointed. It is little more than a condensation of the larger history, written in slightly simpler language. In The Rise of the West the author divided history into three eras: Middle Eastern dominance to 500 B.C., Eurasian cultural balance to 1500 A.D., and the era of Western dominance to the present. His central thesis was that the civilizations of mankind had important interrelations at every stage of their history. He says exactly the same thing in the new book: "Such a survey as this ought to bring home the uncertainty and open-endedness of cultural interactions between Western and non-Western mankind. (In mankind's future) there will surely be blending and intermingling of cultures, as there has always been in the past when men of divergent styles of life met and mingled." Although it is completely re-written, A World History is chapter for chapter a simplified parallel to The Rise of the West. Not having the benefit of pertinent front matter, this reader can only assume that the new version is intended as a student text or as a "reading" edition for those incapable of dealing with the original. One wonders why anyone needs A World History when the complete text of The Rise of the West is available in paper for only a dollar and a half.