Civilizations - Softcover

Fernandez Armesto, Felipe

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330487981 ISBN 13: 9780330487986

Publisher: Pan Books, 2001

Synopsis

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto closely examines the world's societies, from the maritime civilizations of the Polynesians to the Dawada people of the Sahara. It is here that the author seeks the birth of civilization as we know it. Instead of stopping off at the usual cultural tourist spots of Imperial Rome, Enlightenment Paris and Renaissance Florence, Fernandez-Armesto takes us to unfamiliar territories that redefine our understanding of what it is to be civilized.The whole book is crammed with wonderfully anecdotal historical tales, shrewd insights and engaging arguments. In Civilizations Felipe Fernadez-Armesto has written an uniquely challenging and controversial work that shows us not just who we are, but also why we are. 'Fernandez-Armesto is a superb storyteller, with a barrel-full of anecdotes and a language as finely textured as any novelist's' Independent on Sunday

About this title

Review

It is, perhaps, in the end, too long. When the discussion turns to the recent past and a speculative future, its course has been run. However, for the subject it is comparatively terse (Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History ran to 12 toe-stubbing volumes), and the preceding 500 pages have blown by with the heady gusto of a prevailing wind, leaving the dedicated reader short of breath. Felipe Fern“ndez-Armesto is provocative, naughty, and deeply intelligent. He enjoys language in a way few modern novelists do, let alone historians, and his panoramic sweep of the world's civilizations is a proud and preening gesture, through which he rejects, as Norbert Elias did, civilization as a self-referential western concept, and embraces a multi-civilizational world, free of a linear interpretation of time. His aim is to return humankind to its "natural" context, from which for much of the previous few centuries he has, at least in western culture, expended considerable energy extricating itself. Civilizations, resolutely in the plural, are wrought, he contends, through a systematic refashioning of nature, with occasional conditional deferments. Whether through mutual contact or exclusivity, on the frozen tundra, desert sandscapes, highlands, lowlands, grasslands or fertile alluvial plains, and with timber, mud, stone or metal, human beings have consistently come together and shaped their communities accordingly, from the Phoenicians, Aztecs and Romans to the (now-extinct) bird-eating population of the Hebridean island of Hirta. It's all about food, of course, as the Greek empire's growth from the humble olive tree illustrates, but also wind and oceans, migration and colonialism, and while he speculates that the future might lie with a Pacific culture succeeding its Atlantic equivalent, both are still fledglings compared to the Indian Ocean's role in shaping history. The author of Millennium, Fern“ndez-Armesto enlivens his voluble anthropology with empirical tales of, and from, countless travellers, while almost nonchalantly lacing his whirlwind polemic with exquisite literary reference as his appraising lens zooms in and out like a hovering hawk. He calls it an "experimental work", and "written in something like a frenzy". That may be, but it's also daring, richly allusive, and maddeningly thrilling. --David Vincent

Review

"Fernandez-Armesto is a superb storyteller, with a barrel-full of anecdotes and a language as finely textured as any novelist's." Independent on Sunday * "This is a contentious, provocative work, full of utterly original and sometimes perverse perspectives." - Timothy Mo, The Independent * "He accosts you, proposes an interesting subject, and then extends it at enormous length... This is all good fun, and highly readable." - Richard Gott, Literary Review * "Witty...sharply original." Neal Ascherson, The Observer

About this edition

• Publisher: Pan Books
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0330487981
• ISBN 13: 9780330487986
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 656