Book Review – 100 Documents That Changed The World by Scott Christianson

Hardback by Batsford, £14.99 (ebook £8)

One hundred of the most significant documents in human history, dating from 2800 BC to 2011 AD, are presented in this beautifully illustrated and well-written book.

Award-winning author and investigative journalist Scott Christianson has set out his material in chronological order, in a series of “time capsules” which show how the Western world progressed towards the level of freedom and liberalism that it enjoys today. The author has not totally excluded the forces of darkness. We get Hitler’s sinister 1920 programme for what became the Nazi party, long before more than a handful of people had ever heard about him.

We also read about Darwin’s theory of natural selection (1837-59) which was enthusiastically adopted by Hitler a century later, to justify the extermination of human beings.

Many of the documents described here are still often referred to in our culture, but most people probably only have, at best, a sketchy idea of what they are about. This book, with its highly readable descriptions, rectifies that situation admirably.