1,000 Years, 1,000 People, and 18 Years Late

1,000 Years, 1,000 People is a book that ranks the 1,000 most influential people of the last millennium.  I just finished reading the book this week; you might be thinking “aren’t we 18 years into the new millennium?”  Well, we are, but I finally got around to reading this book.

This isn’t a book that you really sit down and read all in one sitting, like a lot of the books that I’ve reviewed here.  Even though I bought this book years ago, it was misplaced until just recently.  I decided to start reading it earlier this year.  I typically would only read about ten entries a day.

This book ranks the people who had the most lasting influence over the last millennium.  Since it’s hard to judge people’s lasting influence if they’re still alive, there are some people that were really influential in the 1900s that didn’t make the book (still, 136 people did).  There are people represented in this book from every century, although 417 people that lived in the 1800s made the list, so it’s still fairly skewed towards people that lived more recently.

Even though 1,000 Years, 1,000 People does represent worldwide influence, the book is still fairly heavily skewed towards the United States (267 of the people in the book lived there).  Then again, the US has been the most influential country in the world since about World War II.  This book was published in 1998, which was right after the Cold War had seemingly ended and was before 9/11.  It was a time when the United States seemed to have an unprecedented influence over the world.

Each entry has the person’s name, the years they lived, a short caption about them, and an approximately 150 word blurb about what they’ve done.  The only exception is Fernão Lopes, who was ranked 780.  Instead of a caption saying why he was important, there is a footnote notation after his name.  The footnote reads “1. father of the footnote”.  Each entry is fairly witty like this, as well as being informative.

With 1,000 people on the list, there’s bound to be some people that you don’t recognize.  The highest ranked people are bound to be people that you recognize: Johannes Gutenberg, Martin Luther, William Shakespeare, etc.  At the bottom of the list, there were a lot of people that I had never heard of, like Bernard Cornfield and Joseph Bramah.  Even at the bottom of the list, almost everybody did something that you’ll be familiar with, like inventing the stethoscope or disposable diapers.

All sorts of people are represented in this book.  There are artists, inventors, politicians, and even some sports heroes.  It seemed to be a nice balance.

1,000 Years, 1,000 People is a book that you can read and learn something interesting from.  If you’re interested in learning about a wide variety of historical figures, but don’t want to read a ton of biographies or peruse dry entries in Wikipedia, you might find this book worth reading.