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How did we get here? David Fromkin provides arresting and dramatic
answers to the questions we ask ourselves as we approach the new millennium. He
maps and illuminates the paths by which humanity came to its current state, giving
coherence and meaning to the main turning points along the way by relating them
to a vision of things to come. His unconventional approach to narrating universal
history is to focus on the relevant past and to single out the eight critical
evolutions that brought the world from the Big bang to the eve of the twenty-first
century. He describes how human beings survived by adapting
to a world they had not yet begun to make their own, and how they created and
developed organized society, religion, and warfare. He emphasizes the transformative
forces of art and the written word, and the explosive effects of scientific discoveries.
He traces the course of commerce, exploration, the growth of law, and the quest
for freedom, and details how their convergence led to the world of today.
History's great movements and moments are here: the rise of
the first empires in Mesopotamia; the exodus from Pharaoh's Egypt; the coming
of Moses, Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad; the fall of the Roman Empire;
the rise of China; Vasco da Gama finding the sea road to India that led to the
unification of the globe under European leadership. Connections are made: the
invention of writing, of the alphabet, of the printing press, and of the computer
led to an information revolution that is shaping the world of tomorrow. The industrial,
scientific, and technological revolutions are related to the credit revolution
that lies behind today's world economy. The eighty-year world war of the twentieth
century, which ended only on August 31, 1944, when the last Russian troops left
German soil, points the way to a long but perhaps troubled peace to the twenty-first.
Where are we now? The Way of The World asserts that the
human race has been borne on the waters of a great river -- a river of scientific
and technological innovation that has been flowing in the Western world for a
thousand years, and that now surges forward more strongly than ever. This river
highway, it says, has become the way of the world, and because the constitutional
and open society that the United States champions is uniquely suited to it, America
will be the lucky country of the centuries to come. Fromkin concludes by examining
some of the choices that lie ahead for a world still constrained by its past and
by human nature but endowed by science with new powers and possibilities. He pictures
exciting prospects ahead -- if the United States takes the lead, and can develop
wisdom on a scale to match its good fortune.
David Fromkin is Professor
of International Relations, History and Law at Boston University. He is the author
of In The Time of the Americans, a History Book Club selection, and A
Peace to End All Peace, a national best-seller, which was a finalist for both
the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize and was singled
out by the New York Times Book Review as an "Editors' Choice,"
one of the thirteen "Best Books of the Year." He lives in New York City.
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