Philip's Atlas Of World History |
Title: Philip's Atlas Of World History (Concise Edition, 2007) | ISBN : 0-540-8867-6 | General Editor: Patrick K. O’Brien | Publisher: Philip's an imprint of Octopus Publishing Group |
Year: 1st edition (May 1, 2002) | ISBN-13 : 978-0-540-08867-6 | Pages: 312
| Language : English | file: pdf
Philip's Atlas Of World History (Concise Edition, 2007)
Philip's Atlas of World History presents the entire story of civilization, from man's earliest beginnings to the latest political developments of the twentieth century.
It is specially designed to help the reader visualize the great historical themes and turning points of the past by combining more than 400 color maps, which graphically depict the scope of these events, with over 200,000 words of text to explain key historical themes and contexts.
It also contains a 20-page gazetteer of historical places, biographies of important figures, and a 22-page time chart.
Ideal for home, secondary school and college use. This atlas gives a fascinating, accessible and truly global, picture of events and their impact on the world we live in todayHaving already written a lushly illustrated overview of the beliefs and practices of the world's religions (World Religions, also from DK), Bowker turns his attention to God and produces a book chock-full of facts, stories, legends and illustrations about the ways that religious traditions have developed their beliefs in God. Bowker first examines the ideas of Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Freud and others to demonstrate that all individuals and societies grapple with the meaning of God. In roughly chronological order, Bowker surveys the history of belief in God in animistic religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Chinese religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. He explores various aspects of this belief, such as the meaning of dharma, the concept of wisdom and the nature of pilgrimage. Yet Bowker's book contains numerous problems. First, he never explains what he means by God. Is God the same as the Sacred or the Divine? Without a clearer explanation, many of the religions that he examines—Buddhism, for example—cannot be said to have a God. Second, does God indeed have a history? That implies that God would have had a beginning and will have an end, which runs counter to the notion that God is eternal and ahistorical. Third, because he does not provide a clear definition of God, Bowker levels the differences among the world's religions so that it appears that the God of Judaism is the same as the God of Hinduism. At best, Bowker provides a superficial overview of the history of belief in God for the "religion lite" crowd.