This book was published in 1963. I thought: "Never mind the 820 pages, I'll read through it in about a month, it will be to outdated". Well... yes it is outdated (as the author is the first to write in an accompanying essay), but nevertheless I took about half a year to absorb all of it.
McNeill is the first one ever to have written a truely world-history (Spengler and Toynbee before him were just speculative stories). Above all, I appreciated his extensive elaboration on the Middle East, China and India and especially the crucial role of the waves of nomadic people in Eurasia. My narrow-minded European-centered history vision has been changed forever!
Ofcourse, 50 years later, much of the details are not up-to-date any more, but the basic asumption of the book, that human civilisation has grown (with ups and downs) through the never-ending interaction between humans, institutions, and cilivisations. This asumption remains true, although McNeill himself, in his accompanying essay, dated 1990, enumerates some fundamental flows in his story (surprisingly, he thinks he has given too little attention to Chinese history). Some of these flows he has adjusted in his book The Human Web, written with his son. Nevertheless The Rise of the West remains, to me, one of the grandest historical works of the 20th century. ( )