My book "World of Patterns: A Global History of Knowledge" was reviewed in the premier journal on history of science Isis, by Arne Kent Jarrick:
"Global studies in the human and social sciences are too often less global than they pretend to be, in many cases covering little more than Europe and a limited number of other regions and countries. In contrast, Rens Bod’s recently published inquiry into the long-term destiny of knowledge is as globally encompassing as one could expect, given the paucity of sources from certain corners of the world. Apart from Europe, his treatise covers large parts of Asia, from the Middle East via India to China and Japan. To a lesser extent Bod also discusses various parts of Africa and the Americas, although here he has to rely on considerably fewer and sometimes pictorial rather than written sources.
World of Patterns is an impressive work, not only thanks to its truly global grasp but also because it spans huge periods of time, from the Paleolithic to the beginning of the nineteenth century, and furthermore because it covers a wide variety of knowledge fields, from the natural sciences to the human sciences— among them astronomy, mathematics, medicine, history, philology, linguistics, literary sciences, and jurisprudence. [...]"
The entire review can be found here.
