Reviews for World History Map Workbook,v.2

The average rating for World History Map Workbook,v.2 based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-09-03 00:00:00 Norbert Bloyet A single-colume history of the modern world is bound to be concise, and when it takes the modern world's start as 1500 it makes it even trickier to avoid just skating over the surface. The huge value of this book is that it looks at history at the global level, whereas we are accustomed to considering say European or English or American history almost in a vacuum. It's fascinating to learn what was going on in China, for example, at the same time as certain events in Europe. Unfortunately this results in the closing chapters being conspicuously rushed, written in paragraphs of barely-connected facts, and the sense of haste is heightened by the fact that the reader might actually have lived through some of these events. Then it all comes to a halt in 2005 (the author himself did so too in 2008, at the age of 92): charity shops are not an ideal source for modern history books. Prof Woodruff, a very interesting man whose other work I am now encouraged to seek out, has effectively mapped what we consider in the west as the age of reason. Even in 2005, when he completed the new edition, he had cause to identify that the age of reason was passing. He says it is giving way to anarchy, although he identifies other streams too - religious fundamentalism, climate change denial, nationalism (an -ism that this book sets firmly in historical context as a modern invention). Thank goodness things are still not much worse than they were in 2005 ...

Review # 2 was written on 2011-05-22 00:00:00 Khalid Shamsher As someone who missed out on a lot of history in my early teens (it's a long story that involves moving house and multiple transfers between schools, etc. etc.), this book is a really neat round up of the last 500 years of world history. It's like the CliffsNotes edition of what most schools teach, though it takes a bit more than a weekend to properly get through. There are some events which I wish it would have focused a bit more on, but as a basic crash course of the last 500 years, it's great.