Book should have been titled differently. It has nothing to do with the Renaissance. It ends where the Renaissance starts. But I do understand where Mrs. Bauer was going. Incredible read. Her take on world history is vast and encompassing. Many reviews of this series focus on the grim aspect of the times. But hey......they were grim times indeed. Until about 400 years ago the world was one big free for all. If you had it....then chances are someone else wanted it and they were going to try to take it. The sheer impunity of the ruling classes over the unfortunates below them led to a precarious and insecure existence to say the least. But then again the ruling classes, with all their pomp were in the same situation. In this world the best thing would simply be to get away from everyone, live in your own corner and hope that everyone else overlooked you and allowed you to live and die in peace. ( )

It's difficult for someone living in the 21st century to look back on history and not speculate that, until relatively recently, most people must have been psychologically unstable. I confess that it certainly seems that way to me at times. Or perhaps history is just proof of the old adage about absolute power corrupting absolutely. There certainly seem to be a fairly large percentage of sadistic psychopaths among the kings, popes, emperors, caliphs and assorted other notables whose names have been been recorded for posterity. The three and a half centuries that Susan Wise Bauer covers in this book are a bit of an improvement over the medieval world, but it still seems a dreadful time to have lived, and not just because of the lack of indoor plumbing. Like the centuries before, it was a time of devastating disease, famine, and wars waged under the authority of seemingly insane rulers and intolerant war-mongering religious leaders. And the same patterns of events happened over and over again, as if no one was paying attention, or at least not learning anything. By the end of this period, however, there is a faint glimmering of hope. The rediscovery of the writings of Greek philosophers may have been part of this. Perhaps people had finally begun to realize that killing people and stealing their stuff was a good way of making other people want to kill you and steal your stuff. Whatever it was, people were beginning to question the absolute authority of kings and priests. Some were, anyway. A lot of them didn't survive for long, but fortunately for us, the questions they were starting to ask did.

This book doesn't attempt to explain how we got from then to now, but it does help us appreciate now a lot more. ( )

Excellent reference, a must have for history buffs. ( )

Excellent and practical book in that each chronological short chapter is followed by a timeline showing the reigns per geographic area that were discussed.
This enables to put the ideas of Aristotle as interpreted by Peter Abelard or translated by Arabic texts in perspective with the Confucian philosophy of Zhu Xi during the Song dynasty in China. Also important to keep the reader's bearing are the great maps and black and white photos to illustrate the narrative. ( )