An Intimate History of Humanity by Theodore Zeldin
“Each civilization, each nation, each family, each profession, each sex and each class has its own history. Humans have so far been interested mainly in their own private roots, and have therefore never claimed the whole of the inheritance into which they were born, the legacy of everybody’s past experience. Each generation searches only for what it thinks it lacks, and recognizes only what it knows already.”
The author compares two characters who may have the same job but live distinctly different lives.
This is a book about the history of being human, and through it we learn a lot about ourselves. It explores how civilisations have been dealing with ideas, and compares them to together. It contrasts, for instance, how the Chinese in the 5th century and Westerners in the 1900 dealt with loneliness. One doesn’t often find a book about the history of how humans treat each other, or how they deal with life – and that’s what makes this book quite unique. At over 500 pages, this book is long – but the chapters are relatively short and are preceded by long titles such as “How people have freed themselves by finding new fears” and “How respect has become more desirable than power”.
It is also gratifying to see the author allude to Chinese, Arab and African history, which is quite uncommon to find in Western books.
Zeldin explores human history through an inductive approach. The first half of a chapter explores a person’s life – often one living in France, and more often a woman – and has the protagonist dealing with a unique problem, or grappling with a different philosophy of living. The author compares two characters who may have the same job but live distinctly different lives. After analysing their characters in the first half of the chapter, Zeldin widens his perspective to include a wider swath of history. He takes specific circumstances and shows how characters from different times and places reacted very differently to them.
One doesn’t often find a book about the history of how humans treat each other, or how they deal with life.
This may be a book written by a historian – as banal as that may sound – but it is also an intimate account that teaches us the unexpected about life. The book reads like fine literature and is as stimulating as a favourite series. Every chapter is followed by a reference list of sources for the reader who wishes to delve further into a specific subject. It is also gratifying to see the author allude to Chinese, Arab and African history, which is quite uncommon to find in Western books.
