a little history of the world by ernst gombrich

“In simple, vivid prose, Gombrich surveys the human past from prehistory to his own time…Lucky children will have this book read to them. “A remarkable book, written in an amiable, conversational style…This resurrected history deserves reading for all its delights.” - New York Times But needs to be taken with a pinch of salt and looked into further.' Great for giving you some of the basic and most important facts. I saw it basically as like a wikipedia article. Hopefully any child/young adult reading this will be tempted to expand further their knowledge, as opposed to believing everything contained within its pages. If this book is to teach anything (and it did for me), it is that you need to do some further digging in order to learn/understand about historical events, not just believe what is on the page in front of you.

So I cannot criticise this book in that respect, and if you assume that this is a stand alone volume on the history of the world then shame on you. Therefore I have used this book as a stepping stone of sorts to explore these periods/events which I find interesting.

And far from being the last word on it, it has inspired me to read further about said events that captured my interest. Therefore, i found that (shamefully) i actually read about things for the first time in the pages of this book. One of my faults, which caused frustration at school, but hey. I consider myself quite a well read and intelligent person on the whole, but I have a complete lack of interest in history. However, from my perspective, i found it to be an informative book that was not meant to fully 'inform', but to provide a taster or peek (if you will) of some of the major events in history. 'I have had a read of the comments and reviews about this book, and tend to agree (more or less) with both sides of the coin which have been argued by his readers. The product of a generous and humane sensibility, this timeless account makes intelligible the full span of human history. This is a text dominated not by dates and facts but by the sweep of mankind’s experience across the centuries, a guide to humanity’s achievements and an acute witness to its frailties. In between emerges a colorful picture of wars and conquests, grand works of art, and the spread and limitations of science. In forty concise chapters, Gombrich tells the story of man from the Stone Age to the atomic bomb. It is now an international bestseller and available in almost thirty languages across the world. Amazingly, he completed the task in an intense six weeks, and Eine kurze Weltgeschichte für junge Leser was published in Vienna to immediate success. In 1935, with a doctorate in art history and no prospect of a job, twenty-six-year-old Ernst Gombrich was invited to attempt a history of the world for younger readers.

A little history of the world by ernst gombrich