The Guiness Book of Records 1492- The World 500 Years Ago Edited by Deborah Manley

The Guiness Book of World Records has a long and strange history, originally being published by the famous Guiness Brewing Company as a way to settle bar bets. But in the years since its inception, it has become far more than that, a way to measure human achievement, among other things, in a fairly definitive way.

In 1992, the company chose to look back at the world as it was 500 years ago, doing the same sort of things it does today, measuring human achievement in many areas, from buildings to sports, to war and to man himself, collecting records of the longest, tallest, oldest and most skilled from that time.

Many of the achievements are apocryphal or were unable to be accurately measured, but are fascinating nonetheless, from the "Most deformed looking animal" (the giraffe, at least according to one European Observer, who was only able to describe it by equating parts of its physique to those of other animals, thus calling it "deformed looking" as the animals whose parts he was listing didn't really look like the parts of the giraffe), to the most valuable metal (gold, of course), to the most skilled swordsmen (from Japan, naturally).

By reading this book, you are able to look back into the past and see the heights of human achievement then, and how far we have come, at least in some areas. I, for one, don't think we have come all that far when you see that wars and battles are still going on, and motivated by many of the same conflicts that caused wars back in 1492. All that has really changed are the weapons we use.

In any case, this is a fascinating book that can show students how limited the world was back then. There was no such thing as travel by car or instant messaging. Messages took weeks to arrive, if not months, and travel was long, dangerous and could be deadly. Diseases were likely to kill you and not as easily survivable as the ones we have today. Influenza was deadly, people generally didn't wash (Cleanliness being next to godliness back then meant if you bathed too often, you were guilty of the sin of Pride, of trying to be like God.) And even the food often wasn't very good. If you were poor, meat was something you might get once a year, if you were lucky. Otherwise you ate grains and vegetables. Better for you, yes, but often boiled to a mushy paste, and your teeth would be a horror. All dentists could do was pull them when they got infected. And it was without anesthesia.

That's another thing this book brings out... how lucky most of us are to live now, with generally clean, abundant food, a generally nutritionally balanced diet and modern medicine and anesthesia. Still, it's worth a visit to the past, and this book is a good way to arrange it. Recommended for people who want to know what the other people of 1492 were up to beyond just Columbus and the Kings.