Origin Story is a nonfiction book written by historian David Christian that cuts across various disciplines from astrophysics to modern history.Most people when they think about history imagine ancient kingdoms engaged in wars.Atmost they may include human prehistory or even human evolution.But in Origin story,Christian goes back almost 14 billion years ago to the start of the universe.

He summarizes the(theory of)the history of the universe,then the history of the earth,including the history of life on earth and finally,in the last part of the book,gives a brief account of human history.All this in a book no longer than 300 pages.Expectedly,he gives a birds eye view of events.He calls it Big History

Microsoft founder Bill Gates has praised Christains work and that enough is a big marketing strength for the book.David Christian coined the term big history and has been teaching it since 1989.Bill Gates has been helping fund Christians efforts to teach Big history to secondary school students all over the world.

The idea of Big History is novel and the book is informative to anyone looking for accurate and concise knowledge of geology, evolution, astrophysics and the human past and a perspective of where we as Homo Sapiens fit into the entire picture.

Origin Story is similar to Bill Brysons A Short History of nearly everything.The difference is that while Bryson’s book gives details of the scientists lives and how the knowledge that we know today was discovered,Christian gives a systematic and birds eye view of the way the past unfolded.Bryson also infuses humour into his writing while Origin Story is more educational.

As the author rightly mentions at the end ,this is the Origin Story with the knowledge that humans currently have.And a lot of this knowledge we have gained only in the past 200 years or so.Before that,there were less scientific although equally convincing sounding-with religious weight-origin stories.And who knows,in a 100 years,this book written in the 2010s may seem like a compilation of the theories of an ignorant age.But as of today, with what we know, this is the ultimate history story.