ineke.co.uk

I picked this up as a way to give myself a quick overview of lots of things I didn’t know. I didn’t like history at school (with a couple of exceptions for the Tudors and Victorians), but thought it would be good to give myself a basic education.

I don’t think this book was the right choice. A lot of the pages seemed to have a load of assumed knowledge on people/places/scenarios, so I didn’t have a clue what they were on about, there wasn’t enough explanation. It also had a large number of typos that a basic spell check would have picked up on, which made me question the quality of what I was reading too. Most pages had an illustration, be it photo, diagram, painting, but they were all in black and white, so when it was a map with a key, it was very hard to distinguish between various shades of grey.

It starts with pre-history and goes right through to the 2008 credit crunch. I particularly struggled with the early stuff, cos I found that I just didn’t care enough, which meant I had a negative attitude through most of the book, and combined with the quality issues mentioned above, I’m just very relieved to have got to the end and ticked it off – it took me a month! Not a book I’ll be keeping.