A slightly juvenile look at history’s timeline, with all of a hundred situations given a short illustrated page, beneath the date they more or less happened and a dot on the globe to show where. The first few are much more ephemeral, as they deal with the birth of history and the development of writing, and the rise of this or that people. They also include the purely legendary, as Moses went up a hill for some medicine and came down with tablets that actually gave you a headache, at least if you were the covetous type, or favoured a more flexible working week. Either way, it’s certainly not history.

Much better are the key, factual specifics – and even better than that, when there is time given to explain just what they mean. A few battles going the wrong way and Greece would have been subservient to the Persians, and thus end up completely different; the Norman Conquest had such a legacy it has to be felt in North American culture today; the Arab oil embargo after losing Round Two against Israel is probably in all our background radiation as I write.

The hundred page-long essays do suffer in being sequential, so the moon landings can’t follow straight on from the birth of the space race, and the division of Germany and the Iron Curtain have to be recapped when we finally see the fall of the Wall. But this, where we see the before, the event and the afters, all in just a few hundred words, certainly proves the author’s powers of concision.

And then it’s homework time – twenty revision questions, followed by two much more serious, essay projects. That proves this is for the school library, as I knew all along, but the idea this is going to serve the eight and up audience that the back cover carries is utterly risible. It’s much more mature than that. It’s a good book, and adults will learn things from this (I think I always thought the Tet Offensive was named after a place, not a slice of the calendar), but just because it has mediocre, CG cartoon-styled illustrations that doesn’t mean primary school audiences will lap up Hammurabi’s laws or Matthew Perry opening Japan up to the world.

No, this is a book for older audiences, seeking the kind of world history that can be presented in such extended bullet points. I know I make this out to sound a lot worse than it is, but there are errors in judgement on the creative team, if not on mine too. It’s actually a very competent summary of many important things, that manages to get the better of its reductive format, and I can’t wish anything this snappy any harm. But I did find it easy to take against.

(Oh, and yes, it most assuredly has been updated since first publication in 1993 – some senile old codger signing Afghanistan back to the Taliban is the latest thing here.)

I think the subject is rather intimidating to put all of world history in one book. Fortunately my son and I are history nerds, so we found this book engaging. I think it would be more difficult to get people engaged in this book if there wasn’t already an inherent interest. I think it’s hard to do a fair treatment of world religions, so while I think that’s a weakness, I’m not sure how they could have been more successful.

I read this with my 6 year old. He loved learning what the events to shaped us. He is a history buff so learning about all these different things that made us us is neat! Great book. Illustrations nice.

So much is covered!

I'm impressed with how much information has been condensed into a kid friendly format.

My kids are huge nerds so this was right up their alley.