"Martin Puchner has exceptional and invaluable gifts: intellectual fearlessness, dazzling erudition, trenchancy tempered by breadth of mind, and a humanist's eye for minute evidence that illumines huge problems. He leaps daringly among well-chosen vignettes to show us what cultural change is like: contingent, fragile, unpredictable, and always dependent on our willingness to exchange objects, people, and ideas." - Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, author of The Oxford Illustrated History of the World

"Fearless and exhilaratingly erudite, Martin Puchner’s panoramic tour of human culture across the millennia is a riveting page-turner. Revealing the beauty and necessity of cultural cross-pollination and borrowing, Puchner’s tour de force is the perfect antidote to our increasingly dreary and close-minded times." - Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

"Cultures develop by sharing, borrowing, and collaborating—but also by conquest, appropriation, and theft. Martin Puchner’s timely book takes us on a breathtaking tour of world history, reminding us that as we judge the past, one day we, too, will be judged, and that when we ignore or try to erase our cultural heritage, we are only impoverishing ourselves." - Louis Menand, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Metaphysical Club

"Culture is a breakneck, utterly captivating survey of threads of cultural transmission—how ideas, stories, and songs—survive, change, vanish, get borrowed, refined, coopted, and grafted through time. Reading this book was like taking a course in the history of humanities from a world-class professor with a rapacious, global, up-to-the-minute curiosity. I underlined sentences on every page." - Anthony Doerr, author of Cloud Cuckoo Land

"If anyone wants to know what it is for comparative literature to encompass the globe, they need only read this remarkable book." - Kwame Anthony Appiah, author of The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity