
The Invention of Yesterday
A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection
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Narrated by:
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Tamim Ansary
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By:
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Tamim Ansary
About this listen
From language to culture to cultural collision: the story of how humans invented history, from the Stone Age to the Virtual Age
Traveling across millennia, weaving the experiences and world views of cultures both extinct and extant, The Invention of Yesterday shows that the engine of history is not so much heroic (battles won), geographic (farmers thrive), or anthropogenic (humans change the planet) as it is narrative.
Many thousands of years ago, when we existed only as countless small autonomous bands of hunter-gatherers widely distributed through the wilderness, we began inventing stories - to organize for survival, to find purpose and meaning, to explain the unfathomable. Ultimately these became the basis for empires, civilizations, and cultures. And when various narratives began to collide and overlap, the encounters produced everything from confusion, chaos, and war to cultural efflorescence, religious awakenings, and intellectual breakthroughs.
Through vivid stories studded with insights, Tamim Ansary illuminates the world-historical consequences of the unique human capacity to invent and communicate abstract ideas. In doing so, he also explains our ever-more-intertwined present: the narratives now shaping us, the reasons we still battle one another, and the future we may yet create.
©2019 Tamim Ansary (P)2019 PublicAffairsHistory told from all perspectives
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What Sapiens wished it was.
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Unfortunately, I cannot fully trust this book and it’s a shame that it wasn’t more well researched. History books shouldn’t be just about ‘stories’.
Not reliable enough
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At the same time however the narrative is broadly reductive and often unbalanced. While the history of Muslim’s cultural contribution is underscored by admiration, the contribution of Europe’s “Christendom” (as the author describes it) is reduced to stories about crusades, catholic oppression and religious backwardness (all of which are narrated with scathing sarcasm). While we learn that the idea of university is effectively a Muslim brainchild (!), the birth and contribution of exceptional European universities in the 16th and 17th centuries receive the briefest mentions.
A wide-ranging, but at times unbalanced, narrative of world’s “yesterday”
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