Welcome to Litsy!

The good: Readable, some parts rather interesting
The bad: Overwhelmingly Eurocentric, white supremacist, and patriarchal view of history, some factual errors, some misinterpretations (his discussions on Marx, modern art were issues for me), and oversights (postmodernist, postcolonialist thought)
The ugly: No source citations or bibliography; his predictions for the 21st century already seem unlikely (his biases certainly hindered him).

“Darwin and Freud. They were a pair of revealers who forced us to see our human nature, although we did not want to. Certainly we are better for this new knowledge, although many of us will never stop hating them for bringing it to us.”

Look what I found in my book! Indonesian money! Definitely the most interesting artifact I‘ve found left in a book.

“Why did they go? For many, the promise of great wealth, real or imagined, was enough to draw them from their homes and down to the sea in ships. For those who went after the first great discoveries had been made, the pursuit of wealth may often have been the greatest lure. But I do not think it was so for the discoverers themselves. And certainly it was not so for Columbus.”

“Our debt to the Babylonian and Egyptian mathematicians is therefore great. But we should recall one rather puzzling fact. The early Greek mathematicians, so famous for their profound intuitions and their brilliant success in geometry, simply did not catch on to the importance of positional notation. There is no doubt that they built on a mathematical base constructed by the Babylonians, and in geometry they went far beyond their teachers.”