Robert J Stone pulls no punches. Humanity is currently on a one-way ride to oblivion, he says, and this is how it happened. One thing led to another. This is Big History. It begins at the beginning and goes until now - from the big bang until just yesterday. In just under 250 pages, it is a rapid ride through captivating terrain. More precisely, it is an effort to construct a coherent and comprehensive narrative account of the unfolding of existence in which each of us can find our origins, our identities, our dignities and tragedies and perhaps something of our commonalities. Stone is attempting to furnish the first draught of a plausible and universally acceptable narrative explanation for how humanity's current state of affairs might have come about. He warns us in the introduction that all historical narrative is fiction parading as truth, and then he plows ahead, seeking to transcend the bias of nation, culture, ideology and faith by calling on Darwin and Einstein to frame his narrative in the context of scientific rationalism. While the book opens somewhat like A Little History of the World for grownups, it quickly addresses a number of key themes which it follows to the end. These include gender relations, social structures, economics, science, technology, culture, art, philosophy, ideology, environment and conflict. Stone's description of the human predicament is far from optimistic. The only chance to avoid extinction, he says, is to become a single, collectively rational, cohesive, inclusive, just and sustainable global humanity. And while that is the only realistic option left, if we can manage it, everything else just might fall into place.
About the Author: Robert J Stone has been writing about culture and conflict for over 30 years, first as an award winning journalist and then as an academic. Over a period spanning the final decade of the Cold War, his reports and analysis from conflict zones around the world featured regularly in a long list of prestigious magazines and newspapers. He received the Canadian National Magazine Award for Political Reporting in 1988. He is also the author of After the Fire's Gone Out, a history of the Nicaraguan revolution, published by Prentice-Hall In 1991. In 1992 he joined the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Chinese University of Hong Kong where he taught in the School of Journalism and Communication for 14 years. He now lives in Spain, where he writes and wonders how it will all turn out.