The Complete Idiot's Guide to European History Book

A good and well written synthesis of the history of Europe, addressed to the passionates of history, less to the specialists. The author manages to compensate the narrative loaded with information through small jokes or even ironies, most of them funny, showing that history can be written in a relaxed, fun style (without being superficial), so that the reading is both pleasant and useful.

Unfortunately, as a Romanian, I can not repress a sense of disappointment about my country's almost nonexistence for an American professor of history, who mentions Romania in just 3-4 places, except for the 1989 Revolution, the other mentions being strictly tangential to other topics. I do not suffer from the "small history" complex and I acknowledge the primordial role of Western countries in the history of the old continent, but almost all of this kind of synthesis, belonging to a Western author, sin through a flagrant disproportion between the space in the book allocated to the West, as opposed to that of the East. But this must be the fate of the peripheral peoples from a civilizational point of view, and we have to come to terms with this reality...