The Cartoon History of the Universe III: From the Rise of Arabia to the Renaissance - Softcover

Gonick, Larry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393324036 ISBN 13: 9780393324037

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002

Synopsis

An irreverent survey in comics spanning world history from the birth of Islam to the Byzantine Empire to the Italian Renaissance.

Larry Gonick's celebrated series The Cartoon History of the Universe is a unique fusion of world history and the comics medium, a work of serious scholarship and a masterpiece of popular literature. Praised by Jonathan Spence in the New York Times Book Review as "a curious hybrid, at once flippant and scholarly, witty and politically correct, zany and traditionalist," Gonick's clever illustrations deliver important information with a deceptively light tone, teaching us about the people and events that have shaped our world. This long-awaited new volume covers the Middle Ages around the globe, including the multicultural Middle East, West Africa and the cross-Saharan trade, Central Asia and the Byzantine Empire, the European Dark Ages and the Crusades, the Mongol conquests, the Black Death, the Ottoman Empire, the Italian Renaissance, and the rise of Spain, leading up to Columbus's departure for the new world. Gonick offers an historical survey that is at once multicultural, humanistic, skeptical, and laugh-out-loud funny.

About this title

About the Author

Larry Gonick is a professional cartoonist and author of The Cartoon History of the Universe series, among other illustrated books. He lives in San Francisco, California.

Reviews

The second volume of Gonick's deeply researched, lucid and hilarious overview of history was published eight years ago. Good things take time, evidently. This third installment begins in the year 395, with the closing of Europe's pagan temples, and ends in 1492, with Columbus and crew setting sail. Readers get an overview of nearly everything that occurred between those two events, from the origins of Islam to the great Chinese dynasties and the Crusades, with "flashbacks" to the rise of African culture, the Turco-Mongol tribes and more. Gonick's take on history is whip-smart, skeptical about familiar but questionable stories and absolutely in command of dozens of simultaneous historical threads. He's also very funny, even at his most respectful. (In the chapter on the life of Muhammad, for instance, he makes a running joke of keeping the prophet permanently off-panel.) Gonick is fond of wacky little digressions, and the book includes plenty of learned slapstick (one ongoing gag concerns the "amazing amount of eye-gouging" in Byzantine history). The architecture and clothes in Gonick's work are drawn with convincing realism, but the people are broad, goofy caricatures, which somehow makes the entire presentation even friendlier: in fact, the author employs a handful of walk-ons disheveled, mustachioed academic types to explain the more complicated points.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Gonick is a veritable industry, having produced cartoon guides to such wide-ranging subjects as physics, sex, U.S. history, and two previous collections of his Cartoon History of the Universe. His work combines extensive research with two excellent teaching tools: pictures and humor. This volume begins with the founding of Islam in the early 600s and ends with Columbus's departure from Spain in 1492. In addition to covering Charlemagne, the Battle of Hastings, the Crusades, and Joan of Arc, it takes in much that is less widely known in America, including histories of the Byzantine Empire, the Turks, India, and more. Though this volume is not as funny as the previous two, Gonick maintains a light tone throughout the unending cycles of invasion, social decay, and religious warfare. As the title suggests, Gonick's figures are cartoony, but his renderings of ancient art and architecture are detailed and realistic. A long, annotated bibliography rounds out the book. The frank nature of Gonick's comments (and jokes) relating to sex make this for adult collections. An excellent example of the educative potential of comics, this history is highly recommended.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393324036
• ISBN 13: 9780393324037
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320