LITTLE HISTORY OF THE WORLD

Must've read for kids. .but adults must read it before you ask kids. .

Could have been much better

Com um texto excepcional, o autor nos leva a compreender a história. Talvez tenha sido o melhor livro que eu li nos últimos anos. As ilustrações são dignas de um mestre das artes.

indeed it is a *little* history of the world, but wonderfully written and aimed at children, opens up many oportunities for discussion and includes many of the important parts of history.

A very enjoyable read.

My 8-year-old daughter and I started reading this as a library book, the version with no illustrations. We liked it so much, we bought the illustrated version.The 40 chapters are short and digestible. According to the preface, the author "was convinced that it should be perfectly possible to explain most things to an intelligent child without jargon or pompous language." It does not talk down to children. The content is streamlined, not too deep or detailed but still with lots of information which may inspire you to do further research on a topic (like where did Hannibal get those elephants?). Finally the storytelling is great, making it very accessible for young people. You feel like grandpa is telling you a story. I would even suggest it to people of any age who would like a nice light read of history. My daughter liked some chapters so much, we read some of them 2 or 3 times in a row...Every book on history has its emphases and bias, so its helpful to know these in advance. This book was intended for central European children. For example, he assumes the child is familiar with the swallow, and explains the location of Egypt as where this swallow flies in the winter time. There is more focus on European history than the rest of the world, although it still has chapters on India, Buddism, Islam, and China. It places more weight on ancient and classical times. At the halfway point, you are still at around 1100 AD. It is great through the 19th century. It would probably be better to find another source for the 20th century, although there are still 2 chapters covering it.I highly recommend the illustrated version over the non-illustrated version. The author is more famous for the classic art history book, "The Story of Art", so as you might expect, most of the illustrations in "A Little History" are artwork contemporary with the period being described, in glorious color on high quality paper. They are fantastic. Its almost like having an art book and a history book in one edition. In fact, I think I'll will put this side by side with my Story of Art, on the bookshelf, and even look at one while reading the other.I originally found this book by looking for a good history book for my daughter. I looked at the DK offerings and others. Those often have issues with dumbed down content or language, sound-byte style presentation of content, outright factual errors, cartoon-style illustrations. There is such a huge gulf between those books and this book in terms of quality, I can't even find the words to express it.I honestly think every house should have this book on a bookshelf.

E. H. Gombrich is a brilliant writer and a great historian. I feel like this would be a great book for children and young adults.