Book Review: Titans of History by Simon Sebag Montefiore

About:

Titans of History: The Giants Who made Our World by Simon Sebag Montefiore is a non-fiction book of extremely short biographies of those people the author deemed as changing the world they lived in. Mr. Montefiore is a prize winning author for both fiction and non-fiction.

• 640 pages
• Publisher: Vintage
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9780525564461

My rating for Titans of History – 3
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Thoughts:

I have enjoyed every book I read by Mr. Montefiore and was excited to see another one of his books. I have read other books in this vain, so I knew what to expect from Titans of History: The Giants Who made Our World by Simon Sebag Montefiore, but I really appreciated the author’s writing style in the past so I was looking forward to reading this one.

The biographies in this book are very short, a few pages each. From these one cannot expect any scholarly analysis of the subjects. This is more of a broad brush take on history, who, what, where, and when with a few short stories about them to make the dry facts more palatable.

This is, of course, a very subjective book. For example, the author includes biblical figures as “Titans of History” even though we don’t really know if he even existed (scholars believe that the biblical Jesus was based on “a Jesus” which existed so they differentiate the two) and using the Bible or Quran as one’s only historical context does a disservice to the reader. This is not to say that these figures did not have an effect on history, they absolutely did, but there is more to them than just repeating stories which might/or might not be true, which I feel are out of context here.

Surprisingly, there is not a bibliography anywhere in the book. This is a great book to keep around while the kids are in school and you want to look up someone famous and get a quick recap of what he or she were about.

Buy Titans of History from Amazon.com*
More Books by Simon Sebag Montefiore*

Zohar — Man of la Book
Dis­claimer: I got this book for free.
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