From the author of The History of the World in 100 Animals , a BBC Radio Four Book of the Week, comes an inspirational new book that looks at the 100 plants that have had the greatest impact on humanity, stunningly illustrated throughout. The ceremonial sloping wooden stool carved in an intriguing half-animal, half-human form that was made by the Taino people of the Caribbean whose society was devastated by the arrival of the Europeans in the West Indies. I used to dislike history lessons in school, and I could not reconcile that with my love and curiosity for ancient civilisations like Egypt, Greece and Rome. Now I know that the problem was with the dispassionate method of teaching employed at school. MacGregor has such an amazing passion for this work. That's what makes the landmark BBC podcast recording so powerful. He delivers a masterful performance that is elevated by his fervor for the topic. He brings a perspective that can only be found by a man who has spent his entire professional career interpreting the stories told by the objects in the world’s most amazing museum.

The sun is available for consumption because of plants. Plants make food from the sun by the process of photosynthesis; nothing else in the world can do this. We eat plants, or we do so at second hand, by eating the eaters of plants. As we were leaving the museum, I asked my brother-in-law (who is settled in England) what book I should buy from the museum, and he suggested the tome under discussion. He had listened to the original BBC radio series and liked it very much. Well, I have to thank him, because this book opened up a whole new vista on how we should view objects in a museum, and why my whirlwind tour left me disappointed.

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One thing MacGregor does often is highlight ethnocentric elitism. Here he is agreeably unpleasant about snobbish Mediterranean attitudes towards the 'Celts' (named thus by the Greeks) who were, I guess, the archetypal barbarians (the word the Greeks used for non-Greeks), but made objects like these unutterably beautiful flagons. He also talks here about the problems of understanding the Celtic lineage through the ancient Greek stereotype and equally misleading, much later British one. "the challenge... is how to get past those distorting mists of nationalist myth-making and let the objects speak as clearly as possible about their own place and their own distant world." Quite.

The first gun was a plant, we got fire from plants, we have enslaved people for the sake of plants. We humans like to see ourselves as a species that has risen above the animal kingdom, doing what we will with the world. But we couldn’t live for a day without plants.Plants also give us shelter, beauty, comfort, meaning, buildings, boats, containers, musical instruments, medicines and religious symbols. The objects are interesting and well chosen to illustrate the cultures they came from and the changing technologies, beliefs, and challenges of the people who made them. If you regard the pieces as academic then they're pretty engaging. If you consider them for the lay reader / mass public ... then they're a little dry in places. I bought A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor three years ago from the British Museum in London. MacGregor takes the reader through the history of the world by highlighting artifacts from the British Museum. This is an interesting read. In the British Museum I usually feel nearly overwhelmed by conflicting emotions. I am ashamed of my country's heritage of colonisation and our seemingly unclouded sense of entitlement to enjoy the world's riches, and at the same time I am utterly seduced by this booty and plunder, and I'm shedding these useless White Tears and doing nothing to dismantle the master's house as it were. Reading this is perhaps too soothing at times, and I tried not to be soothed, and to keep seeing as many layers as possible.

It did encourage me to write a small piece in the same style for an object from the Broken Empire (the world my books are set in), which later helped me secure a gig writing for a multi-player Xbox game where a portion of the world building is delivered through the history of discovered objects. Though the book acts as an enthusiastic and informative guide to the ways in which objects can tell us stories about ourselves and our past, it remains aware of the issues with museums and the destructive process of collecting that filled them. It engages with the debate, offering no answers, but posing questions that the reader can consider, and manages to balance a celebration of the artefacts and their cultures without negating the controversial aspect of their current home. From the author of The History of the World in 100 Animals, a BBC Radio Four Book of the Week, comes an inspirational new book that looks at the 100 plants that have had the greatest impact on humanity, stunningly illustrated throughout. As humans, we hold the planet in the palms of ours hands. It is mentioned that sometimes only objects can tell about the people, since there was no writing, or the written texts were on a material that couldn't stand the wear of time (the climate, the place, the robbers and so on). One of the objects I have as a museum souvenir (the Rosetta Stone) - a paperweight. Objects force us to the humble recognition that since our ancestors left East Africa to populate the world we have changed very little. Whether in stone or paper, gold, feathers or silicon, it is certain we will go on making objects that shape or reflect our world and that will define us to future generations”, thus the closing remarks at the end of the book!

I love this book. I got it from my dear friend Dean, who is a museum professional, as a gift last Christmas. The reading of it has lasted me the entire year and has been a source of continual wonder. It consists of a series of short essays on 100 objects chosen by the director of the British Museum to tell the story of the history of the world. The objects are beautiful, inspiring, ingenious, inventive, compelling, challenging, complex, profound. I kept the book by my bedside. Sometimes I would read several essays in a row. But more often my reading was more spaced out because a single essay could set off a chain-reaction (like the entry on the Standard of Ur, which led me to read Sir Charles Leonard Woolley's first-hand account of his fabulous archeological discoveries in the ancient Sumerian city in the mid-1930s). I spent hours researching the objects on the Internet, looking at images, looking at maps. Just in case anyone fancies a taster, or to give you a flavour of the things described, my favourite objects were: The rationale of the 100 Objects project attracted me as soon as I heard of it. MacGregor states at the outset that part of the idea was to tell the stories of ordinary people rather than only elites. I'm aware of this as a trend through my Mum's work advocating for more female and vernacular stories in heritage, and this is one of the things I appreciate about the BM. There are lots of rich and royal things in here but an attempt at widening the view is detectable. I have always struggled to absorb histories; I can take in a narrative thread but I find it extremely hard to synthesise parallel stories into big pictures, and I was pleased to find that the focus on objects helped me to take in a lot more than usual.