Customer Reviews

The Penguin Atlas of World History: Volume 1: From Prehistory to the Eve of the French Revolution (Penguin Reference Books)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

As a reader I like to have quick reference books at my finger tips including a new version of the Oxford English Dictionary about 3500 pages long - that I use almost daily. So I decided to add a "history atlas". In the process of doing my research I read the other amazon.com reviewers and then made three trips to two large book stores to actually look at the books and get a better feel for which was the best. I ended up buying the Oxford Atlas of World History. Here are my picks and rankings.

Listed by My ranking, #1 is the best, #2 is a creative alternative but no substitute.

1. Atlas of World History, Oxford University Press 2002, 368 pages, $57.80, 13.5" x 10.3" x 1.62" ranked 46,632 on Amazon.com. Hands down winner - professional - good text descriptions, outstanding maps and drawings, covers most things from the cave man forward. Negatives: Big and heavy. If you want to save a few dollars buy the "concise" version.

2. Creative alternative: The Penguin Atlas of World History, Penguin Books 2004, $11.20, just a paperback sized, just published, 304 pages. Surprisingly impressive, lots of text and pictures mixed together and it is easy to carry around. A nice quick alternative but it will be printed in two volumes.

3. Timelines of World History, DK Publishing 2002, 666 pages, $27.20. 10.0" x 1.6" ranked 25,800 on Amazon.com. Second with lots of value but in some ways not as comprehensive.

4. National Geographic Almanac of World History, National Geographic 2003, 384 pages, $28.00, 9.6" x 7.8" x 1.17" ranked 24,426 on Amazon.com. Similar to but less impressive than Oxford books. More text, narrower coverage, fewer maps and drawings.

5. DK Atlas of World History, DK Publishing, 352 pages, $35.00, 10.96" x 14.66" x 1.28" ranked 10,716 on Amazon.com. My last place book seems like a giant comic book. I love the DK travel books but this seems like one step beyond DK's area of expertise. Superficially it is similar to the Oxford book and it is cheap, and some might like it but it tries to be politically correct and fails.

6. Oxford Dictionary of World History, Oxford University Press, 704 pages, $7,66, pocketbook sized, sales rank 330,000. Mainly terms, people, and dates but has a few maps also. Limited use but an alternative. I prefer the new Penguin book but this is the best history dictionary to buy.

This has been my bible ever since I bought it 15 or so years ago. For the sheer information to weight ratio this is the densest and most useful book I have ever seen. Every single page is a high colour, quality map on one side with extremely concise notes on the other side. Massively indexed. Quite different, and I think considerably better, than the books I have just bought in Penguin's new series. Although the new ones are a bit more user friendly and less intimidating for the general reader, I suppose.

Note the small size of this atlas (7"x4.5"), and you'll understand the low cost. Therein lie many compromises. This atlas does continue a lot of useful information, but it often fails as a self-contained atlas. The biggest problem is the maps themselves, which are quite "pixilated"; not sure if that's because of the way they were drawn, or something to do with the printing process. But the final effect is one that makes many of the maps difficult to use; I kept having to pull out a larger map or atlas to understand where it was that I was looking at on the Penguin map. I found the complete loss of artistic quality more troublesome than the actual loss in content. I learned using this atlas, but did not enjoy the experience.

The atlas will surely fail to satisfy anyone that loves maps and higher quality atlases. We have to suppose this is an atlas meant for students, and for that purpose, it likely is a useful resource at a reasonable price.

This is one of the best histroical atlas available, given its compact size for quick desktop reference. Despite the small size, the maps and diagrams are carefully prepared to convey a lot of relevant information. Together with the text, this provides both an outline (in choronlogical order) as well as quite a lot of details on what has happened around the world. Very impressed, since I bought an earlier edition 17 years ago.

I have loved maps and history for longer than I care to admit and I was fortunate enough to have a father who shared these interests and provided a fertile and far-ranging "garden" of books for my edification and enjoyment growing up. One of my favorites was this book. The story skips ahead many years--I decided to look for this book, which had been out of print or at least unavailable for a long time. I found it here on Amazon and ordered it, along with another larger highly touted atlas from another publisher (rated #1 by another reviewer). Much to my delight and surprise, the Penguin atlas has aged quite well (to be expected given the period covered). Its strength lies in the abundance and thoroughness of the map coverage--where other atlases give one map, this one often gives three or more--and in the "extracurricular" material such as diagrams illustrating governmental organization. Incidentally, I was sorely disappointed in the other atlas, which cost far more and sported foolish and uninformative cartographic projections as well as such vast lacunae in coverage as to render it virtually worthless as a serious reference.

As I see it, the heart of any atlas worth its salt must be its maps and this compact, user-friendly little volume offers such a wealth of these that it exposes other historical atlases as the patchy, inadequate waste of paper most of them are. I don't buy an atlas for text--though this atlas has excellent if necessarily skeletal narrative accompaniment--I buy it for the maps, to complement my reading. There's nothing sillier than an "atlas" that overdoes it on the text at the expense of the maps; oddly enough, Penguin also publishes some of what I consider the worst atlases available today (see their atlas of the Roman Empire for a prime example)--go figure.

Really this atlas does everything right. My sole complaint is the small size, but this could just as easily be considered a plus (for portability, ease of use, etc.); if only there were a large format historical atlas to match--I'm still looking for a worthy counterpart.

This book really does cover nearly all events that have taken place in this period of history, But it is written in the shortest form possible. I really recommend this book as well as its second edition to anyone who truly loves history.

This entire series is superb and is absolutely essential for any lover of historical atlases. I have been an owner of virtually all of them for at ten years and I can honestly say that they are most read books of all that I own.

The reason is their unique portability and scope. Most historical atlas are huge, heavy and expensive. They are difficult to read unless you are sitting at a table and very difficult to carry. This limits their utility (even though I still love them). Most history books have lots of dense detail about one nation or one period. Virtually none cover the broad sweep of an entire region over centuries.

While the Colin McEvedy line of Penguin Historical Atlases (which I highly recommend) is more map oriented, the Kinder/Hilgemann line is much more text oriented. It starts in the late 18th Century and ends just after the Cold War. As its title suggests, it literally covers the entire world, although it is heavily biased towards Europe. In an effort to cover everything, the authors makes frequent use of abbreviations and symbols. This is a little annoying, but you get used to it.

Like all Penguin Historical Atlases, it is small, light, reasonably priced and incredibly broad in scope. These atlases offer a unique perspective on history than is otherwise impossible to achieve. Their size and weight make them perfect for travelling. Whenever I go on a trip, I take the most relevant ones with me. That way I can brush up on my history of the region.

What is most fun for me is to trace the history or one nation, province or sub-region through the entire atlas. In just a few minutes I can learn as much as spending days reading an entire book. You can also see how individual nations interact with each other, a subject often left out of typical history books.

I was rather disappointed when I receive the book. The print was too small. It serves well as a history "dictionary" but not if one wish to know more in detail. The paper and colour quality is rather good though.

THE PRINT IS SO SMALL I COULDN'T READ IT WITHOUT A MAGNIFYING GLASS! Very inconvenient.The organization is confusing and there is not enough information on the Renassiance, the most important era in all of history. Other than that, I liked the book. There was a lot of information which was tangential to the information I was seeking and although distracting, interesting.

This two book set is the same as the old Anchor Atlas of World History though volume 2 has been updated to bring the set more or less to the present. I fell in love with the Anchor Atlas set to the point I wore out my first set so I bought a second set. Then the publisher took the book out of print. It stayed that way until the last couple of years when Penguin took over.

These atlases are perhaps the most comprehensive of any similar books on the market. One or two come close, but I think Penguin's atlas is still the best if you are looking for a brief overview. Critics say the print is too small or the content is not detailedenough. I disagree with both criticisms. I believe a historical atlas should be brief. The intent is to cover an event and depict it in maps. If in depth analysis is wanted, then find a book dedicated to the particular topic.

I bring these books with me whenever I travel and want something to read. In fact, back in high school we had a group assignment of what books we would bring along if we were to be stranded on a desert island. I convinced my group these books were worthy of such a list. With them back in print I can finally discard my first set (the glue binding disintegrated leaving me with single pages. I bought this set to the cabin for casual reading up there. Now I can bring my first replacement set up there.

I just can't say enough good things about these books. I did notice a flaw in a map label in volume 2 that has not been corrected since the initial publication. In a map showing the early United States they label as "Minnesota Territory" those lands which were originally the Wisconsin Territory after Michigan gained statehood. This flaw leads me to wonder about other maps whose labels I'm not as well versed it. But overall I still remain very impressed with this set. Anyone who buys this set for what it is: an introduction to the topics it presents accompanied by detailed maps, will not be disappointed.