Dorling Kindersley Books (DK) recently published a four-hundred-page textbook on Big History with spectacular illustrations and content. This twenty-first century version of an illuminated manuscript might well be your best Bible to Big History. Big History also makes a great gift for growing minds.
At five and a half pounds, this is not a book you’ll want to carry around. It deserves a prominent place on your coffee table and in the school libraries. It was written by a team at Macquarie University’s Big History Institute in Sydney along with the DK team in London. DK is famous for their beautiful travel, history, art, and science books. Big History packs a universe of knowledge into an accessible, informative and visually stunning book.
At around $30 one suspects the hand of a benefactor in bring this book to press. Indeed, Bill Gates blurbs the cover. Think of it as the Gutenberg version of the free, online, high school curriculum that Gates has funded — see BigHistoryProject.com.
Big History takes a prominent place next to the other sacred books in my library and should in yours as well.
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William Grassie has a bachelor's degree in political science and international relations from Middlebury College and a doctorate in religion from Temple University. He has taught in a variety of positions at Temple University, Swarthmore College, and the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to graduate school, he worked for 10 years in international relations and conflict resolution in Washington, D.C., Jerusalem, Berlin, and Philadelphia. He is the recipient of a number of academic awards and grants from the American Friends Service Committee, the Roothbert Fellowship, and the John Templeton Foundation. In 2007–2008, he served as a Senior Fulbright Fellow in the department of Buddhist studies at the University of Peradeniya in Kandy, Sri Lanka. He is the author of The New Sciences of Religion: Exploring Spirituality from the Outside In and Bottom Up (Palgrave Macmillian, 2010) and a collection of essays, Politics by Other Means: Science and Religion in the 21st Century (Metanexus, 2010). He has also edited two volumes: Advanced Methodologies in the Scientific Study of Religion and Spirituality (Metanexus, 2010) and H+/-Transhumanism and Its Critics (Metanexus, 2010) with Gregory Hansell. For more information, go to www.grassie.net.
