World History For Dummies (For Dummies)

Amazon has listed "World History for Dummies" as a computer/tech book. This is obviously a mistake. It is a history book.

I couldn't go past 100 pages. What I read was written in a very disorganized way. It keeps going back and forward in time which makes it very difficult to follow. Then it will go through hundreds of years in a paragraph while devoting a lot more text to explain random details. Overall, I found it pretty messy and hard to read.

As a lover of History, I got this book to help ensure that if I had any obvious holes in my general World History knowledge, that I could find them out and patch them up.

I'm still going through the book, but I feel I have enough information thus far to give a decent review. It looks to have most of the essentials of a nice little Western Civ/World History survey class. Which is pretty much what I was looking for. One must understand that cramming the HISTORY OF THE ENTIRE WORLD into a single volume book is daunting, and if the book is a "For Dummies" book, it's impossible. But, all things considered, the author did a fine job. I recommend this book, but I'd get it used and cheaper (I paid $5 for my like-new copy, shipping included, right here on Amazon).

My complaints? Not many. The only thing I can complain about is what is very common in, shall we say, Liberal Arts books these days. That, of course, is revisionist (the dreaded) "PC" history.

Look, I understand that decades ago Americans were taught a very rose-tinted version of American and World History. No one denies this. As a matter of fact, show me a society back then that gave an entirely unbiased historical account of their country and I'll eat my hat.

My problem, however, is that for the past decade or two there has been a movement to counter this in such a radical way that historians now present most European/Christian/(White people in general) very negatively, in relation to other peoples of the world. Again, I understand and sympathize that you are trying to counter earlier viewpoints. The problem is that children today are ONLY getting this radical backlash.

Ignore the PC rhetoric and just use the book for what it is: a survey.

Since my knowledge of this subject is limited, it was nice to have a product that helped me while also being quite entertaining.

This is a terrible book! The history parts are disjointed and badly arranged. The worst part of the book is the author's constantly referring to some movie on the historical topic at hand - and often the movies he mentions are junk movies. With so little space to cover world history, I can't believe he would waste so much on old Kirk Douglas movies, for instance!!