Customer Reviews

Concise Atlas of World History

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This review pertains to the 312-page Concise Edition of the Oxford Atlas of World History with the ISBN 019521921X. The larger original edition has 352 pages and the ISBN 0195215672.

The book is a variation of one of the best (and perhaps *the* best) "atlas of world history" tomes. However, this scaled-down version's text is just not as easy on the eyes as that of the full-size book. The map and text content are the same for both books so the concise version is certainly a real value at about half the price. The Concise Edition does omit the glossary but I do not consider that an essential feature of the original book. The larger original version came out in 1999 (and was reprinted in 2002). The Concise Edition is merely a reprint of the 1999 book and I can find no updated data. An advantage of the Concise Edition (besides the lower price) is its physical handiness; the original is quite close in size to the big Hammond Atlas of World History. Nevertheless, I like to casually browse through atlases so the increased eye-friendliness of the larger type and map detailing in the big version is well-worth its added expense and clumsiness for my purposes.

The Concise Edition is indeed legible and would be OK for just occasional reference but not protracted reads, in my opinion. It is really a 5-star book but I rate it at 4 stars because of this truncated size. I am returning my Concise Edition and keeping its big brother. Both editions are still available from Amazon at the time of this writing.

The affordable price tag of this set of maps paired with its applications to both home and school library patrons will earn it a place on many a home bookshelf as well as libraries: Atlas Of World History, Concise Edition is the result of over three years of intensive effort by a team of academics and editors, and presents the story of humanity from a physical, cartographic perspective. Five parts correspond with the five eras studied by world historians today, making for a particularly accessible set of maps.

As a person with a casual interest in history, I was hoping that a book summarizing everything would exist. This is that book. The development and changes of borders in world history is something that interests me and Atlas of World History did not disappoint. Through the pages are the stories of the rise and fall of great empires. There are more maps than I could have ever wanted. The text itself is interesting, albeit in the expected textbook format. The book is almost always non-biased towards historical events. There are also summaries of larger scale wars such as the World Wars, the American Civil War, and so on. I imagine that one could spend a lot of time just thumbing through the pages looking at the maps which are all beautifully and clearly illustrated.

As far as I can tell, there are very few errors in the book. Some of this comes from the fact that borders were sometimes in a constant state of flux (see Byzantine Empire). Also important to note is that the goal of this book is summarizing. For example, the Roman Empire gets only two pages.

In conclusion, if you like history and want a visualization of the borders and people's movement throughout the times but you are not looking for something in-depth, buy this book.

I have been reading a book on Genghis Khan, and tried this book to provide more understanding. Beyond this, it was excellent, and better than I expected in covering various other historical times and events.

Atlas allows you to match historical events with geographical maps. The best use is for people who know the historic event but want to refresh it in geographical context or just like me enjoy to browse through historical maps.It is not replacing history books (text that accompanies maps is rather concise) but represents a good addition to them.
The drawback is small font size which makes it difficult to read.

As a proud owner of the two volume set "Anchor Atlas of World History" I was hesitant to buy something new. But each year that classic becomes more dated so I figured now was the time. I looked at several historical atlases and decided on this one. The text is thorough and the maps are very good. One can learn a lot from this atlas but I still defer to the "Anchor Atlas" as being the best ever written.

This book is a total disapointment to say the least!

I'm not interested in farming & agriculture 2500 years ago, I'm interested in historical facts such as wars, kings, quuens, tyrants etc.

I wish I could get my money back!