The Book of Firsts is an entertaining, enlightening, and highly browsable tour of the major innovations of the past twenty centuries and how they shaped our world.

Peter D’Epiro makes this handy overview of human history both fun and thought-provoking with his survey of the major “firsts”—inventions, discoveries, political and military upheavals, artistic and scientific breakthroughs, religious controversies, and catastrophic events—of the last two thousand years. Who was the first to use gunpowder? Invent paper? Sack the city of Rome? Write a sonnet? What was the first university? The first astronomical telescope? The first great novel? The first Impressionist painting? The Book of Firsts explores these questions and many more, from the earliest surviving cookbook (featuring parboiled flamingo) and the origin of chess (sixth-century India) to the first civil service exam (China in 606 AD) and the first tell-all memoir about scandalous royals (Byzantine Emperor Justinian and Empress Theodora). In the form of 150 brief, witty, erudite, and information-packed essays, The Book of Firsts is ideal for anyone interested in an enjoyable way to acquire a deeper understanding of history and the fascinating personalities who forged it.

 
Peter D’Epiro received a B.A. and M.A. from Queens College and his Ph.D. in English from Yale University. He has taught English at the secondary and college levels and worked as an editor and writer for thirty years. He has written (with Mary Desmond Pinkowish) Sprezzatura: 50 Ways Italian Genius Shaped the World (Anchor Books, 2001) and What Are the Seven Wonders of the World? and 100 Other Great Cultural Lists—Fully Explicated (Anchor Books, 1998), which has appeared in British, German, Russian, Lithuanian, and Korean editions. He has also published a book and several articles on Ezra Pound’s Cantos, a book of translations of African-American poetry into Italian, and rhymed verse translations from Dante’s Inferno. He has a grown son, Dante, and lives with his wife, Nancy Walsh, in Ridgewood, New Jersey.