John E. Wills's masterful history ushers us into the worlds of 1688, from the suicidal exaltation of Russian Old Believers to the ravishing voice o...
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Apr 22, 2011
Grantcorp
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I really wanted to like this book. Wills has crafted a competent overview of the state of affairs in 1688, picked a number of cities and famous people and introduces them without much overlapping in separate chapters. Among other things we learn about the Spanish dealings in the New World, struggles between Protestants and Catholics in Western Europe, the coming of Tsar Peter in Russia, the slave trade along the West African coast, court politics under the Kangxi Emperor and we follow the faithf
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Apr 07, 2011
Sesana
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The title tells it all, really. The year 1688 is probably best known (amongst those who have studied British history, that is, not me) as the year of the Glorious Revolution. This book touches on that, of course, but it also tries to give a fairly complete snapshot of life pretty much everywhere else in the world at the same point in history. It's very interesting to compare the same year in Edo, Australia, Mexico, and Paris. Of course, it's all very brief, but I did kind of like that. Consideri
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Apr 20, 2010
Catherine
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Gets to a 3+ for me. I like the notion of packing global history for a single year into a single book and Willis finds a lot of detail and information that I hadn't read before. The international context is pretty compelling and he's got an excellent writing style for this kind of social history. Where it doesn't work for me is that a lot of the information comes across as vignettes, presumably due to the publisher's desired page count. There isn't enough backdrop to really follow one series of
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Dec 16, 2009
Freda
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Wills does a creditable job of reporting what Europeans wrote about various parts of the world in 1688, but the book obviously suffers from a lack of indigenous writing. In writing about West Africa, for example, he writes, “We are disproportionately dependent of Europeans feeling their way along the coast of Africa.”
Chapter 21: The World of the Great Sultan” talks of the decaying of the Ottoman empire. It contains an excellent excerpt of an autobiography of Osman Agha, a practicing Mus More...
Chapter 21: The World of the Great Sultan” talks of the decaying of the Ottoman empire. It contains an excellent excerpt of an autobiography of Osman Agha, a practicing Mus More...
Jan 26, 2011
Ian
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A series of historical vignettes from a pivotal year in world history. Wills examines cultural commonalities (and differences) in an increasingly interconnected globe, emphasizing the intercultural exchange in material goods and ideas that came to define the eighteenth century. Astonishing in its breadth and ambition, and fascinating in its detail.
Jul 31, 2009
M. D.
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Fine popular history book. Clearly written and compellingly organized. It didn't launch me into orbit or anything, but I do recommend it.
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Jan 31, 2011
H.N.
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This book was more tedious than I was expecting. While there were some interesting vignettes, and it's a gigantic task to take on reporting history everywhere in the world during one single year, I ended up a little more confused about some facts than I was before I started the book.
Aug 20, 2008
R.
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A hodgepodge of information with little synthesis or over-arching interpretive unity.
Dec 28, 2010
Ilya
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In 1688, Louis XIV was the Sun King of France (Sun as the source of light and warmth, not the center of the universe, which was not yet the politically correct viewpoint). After his wife died, he secretly married Marquise de Maintenon, the tutor of his children by his mistress, a pious Catholic, and revoked the Edict of Nantes that guaranteed religious freedom to Protestants, although his second wife's influence on this decision has been exaggerated. Hundreds of thousands of Protestants illegall
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