Book Log 2020 #14: The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan

The main thesis of this book is that the east-west exchange fostered by the Silk Road - the trading routes between Asia and Europe - played a much larger role in the development of Western civilization than normally credited, and should be thought of on par with the influence of Greece and Rome. Or to riff off of another book about global interconnectedness, the world was flat well before Thomas Friedman came along.

I gave this book three stars on Goodreads, so there was something I found a little off about this book, but I don't know what it was. The book comes in at over 600 pages, so maybe I found it a bit repetitive? Or maybe I just wasn't a fan of Frankopan's writing style. Or I found the idea that Europeans were influenced by Persia and peoples farther east to not be that surprising. Don't know. It's probably worth a read (a 2018 update adds coverage of China's Belt and Road initiative).