I have just completed reading Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, by David Christian, and even after more than 500 small-font pages of dense ideas, I inhaled the final section - twin appendices actually - and audibly exhaled a satisfied "Wow."
Maps of Time is one of the most significant books to impact upon my recent intellectual development, if not the most significant. Prior to this book, I was not even aware of the new genre of history known as "Big History". Now - and forever after - I will view everything - and I mean everything - through the prism of Christian's fascinating concepts, which essentially unite all of science and all of human history into a single grand discipline.
Christian launches his opus by promising the reader "a modern creation story" -- sans supernatural creatures - that explains how we got to be the advanced, networked, highly-intelligent 21st century beings reading this book, and he eloquently delivers. So we begin our human history not with the first cities in 3000 BCE or Neolithic villages in 8000 BCE or even the australopithecines circa 3 million years ago, but rather with the Big Bang event itself, some 13 billion years ago.
For the non-scientist, some of the physics concepts are a bit tough - it is difficult for me to "grok" the "theory of inflation," for example, which posits that ". . . for a fraction of a second, between ca.10-34 and 10-32 seconds after the big bang, the universe expanded faster than the speed of light . . . driven apart by some form of antigravity." But the overall ideas are easier to negotiate than with a Stephen Hawking book, and the science does not bog down the text, but rather enlightens it. I won't remember everything I read in that chapter, and I'll be even less competent regurgitating it at a cocktail party, but I was nevertheless filled with awe for both the magnificence of Big Bang cosmology and Christian's ability to distill it to a general audience.
And the book has amazing momentum, driven primarily by Christian's effortless movement from one discipline to another to highlight the ideas he articulates, as well as to provide fertile ground for wonderful metaphors - he refers to slaves as "human batteries" for example - that consistently remind us that despite the seeming chaos and randomness in human history and the universe itself, there is also an amazing sense of cross-disciplinary order that appears to affect everything. And that's where those outstanding metaphors and similes come in that make you smile and shake your head slowly from side to side in a kind of "I-am-not-worthy" appreciation of his skills as a writer and a thinker.
He liberally borrows from and incorporates the work of others (always with appropriate credit) to weave an even tighter narrative. I remember having to pause and sigh when I came upon this in a discussion of the explosion of human populations and the dominant role of our species in the biosphere: "Humans have become [according to Margulis and Sagan] . . . a sort of "mammalian weed" . . . [and according to Cipolla, it is as if we are] . . . in the presences of the growth curve of a microbe population in a body suddenly struck by some infectious disease. The `bacillus' man is taking over the world." Heady stuff indeed!
This is a big, dense, long book, and I took my time reading it over several months, while I read other books at the same time. Maps of Time is not really intended, in my view, for a cover-to-cover read that swallows all the material in a sudden gulp, but rather in slow, meaningful sips that will treat your intellect to some serious and repeated "treats" that you will marvel at even as you find your entire perspective towards history and the sciences irrevocably altered by this monumental work.
David Christian is Professor of History at San Diego State University, and he teaches courses on big history. For my recent birthday, I received as a gift the Teaching Company audio set of 48 lectures for his course "Big History: The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Humanity," which I look forward to keeping me company in the car for many hours to come. Moreover, it is not entirely out of the question that one day I will read Maps of Time again, if only to relive the intellectual rapture I experienced on my first time through.
Don't miss this book! It will forever change the way you conceive of yourself as a part of the universe, and perhaps your macro view of the universe itself.
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There is a newer edition of this item:
Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, With a New Preface (California World History Library)
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$116.94
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Usually dispatched within 3 to 4 days
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