A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND
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Download free A Criminal History of Mankind pdf ebook. I was about twelve years old when I came upon a bundle of magazines tied with string in a secondhand bookshop - the original edition of H. G. Wells’s Outline of History, published in 1920. Since some of the parts were missing, I got the whole pile for a few shillings. It was, I must admit, the pictures that attracted me - splendid full-page colour illustrations of plesiosaurs on a Mesozoic beach; Neanderthal men snarling in the entrance to their cave; the giant rock-hewn statues of Rameses II and his consort at Abu Simbel. Far more than Wells’s text, these brought a breathless sensation of the total sweep of world history. Even today I feel a flash of the old magical excitement as I look at them - that peculiar delight that children feel when someone says, ‘Once upon a time ...’
In 1946, Penguin Books republished ten volumes of Wells to celebrate his eightieth birthday, including the condensed version of the Outline, A Short History of the World. It was in this edition that I discovered that strange little postscript entitled ‘Mind at the End of Its Tether’. I found it so frustrating and incomprehensible that I wanted to tear my hair: ‘Since [1940] a tremendous series of events has forced upon the intelligent observer the realisation that the human story has already come to an end and that Homo sapiens, as he has been pleased to call himself, is in his present form played out.’ And this had not been written at the beginning of the Second World War - which might have been understandable - but after Hitler’s defeat. When I came across the earlier edition of the Short History I found that, like the Outline, it ends on a note of uplift: ‘What man has done, the little triumphs of his present state, and all this history we have told, form but the prelude to the things that man has yet to do.’ And the Outline ends with a chapter predicting that mankind will find peace through the League of Nations and world government. (It was Wells who coined the phrase ‘the war to end war’.)
Download A Criminal History of Mankind
In 1946, Penguin Books republished ten volumes of Wells to celebrate his eightieth birthday, including the condensed version of the Outline, A Short History of the World. It was in this edition that I discovered that strange little postscript entitled ‘Mind at the End of Its Tether’. I found it so frustrating and incomprehensible that I wanted to tear my hair: ‘Since [1940] a tremendous series of events has forced upon the intelligent observer the realisation that the human story has already come to an end and that Homo sapiens, as he has been pleased to call himself, is in his present form played out.’ And this had not been written at the beginning of the Second World War - which might have been understandable - but after Hitler’s defeat. When I came across the earlier edition of the Short History I found that, like the Outline, it ends on a note of uplift: ‘What man has done, the little triumphs of his present state, and all this history we have told, form but the prelude to the things that man has yet to do.’ And the Outline ends with a chapter predicting that mankind will find peace through the League of Nations and world government. (It was Wells who coined the phrase ‘the war to end war’.)
Download A Criminal History of Mankind
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