Sam Atkinson

Quite thorough for a book only a little over 300 pages long, and I really enjoyed seeing everything laid out and summed up so crisply. I do wish the book had been more carefully edited, though, as I kept stumbling upon instances of BCE or even AD used when CE was intended, dates out of order on the timelines or inconsistently listed on various pages, and perplexingly vague descriptions ("future president Benjamin Franklin," huh? president of what? Pennsylvania? the Academy and College of Philadelphia? the American Philosophical Society? the Pennsylvania Abolition Society? and when you say "east" in reference to the Mongol expansion, do you really mean "Middle East" or did you actually intend to write "west" there?).

I ended up doing a lot more fact-check Google searches than "ooh, I want to learn more!" Google searches...though sometimes the one did lead to the other. (Did you know the moai on Easter Island were walked not rolled or dragged? And that Mt. Vesuvius is much more likely to have erupted in October or November, not August as Pliny the Younger, and this book, describe?) So a win-win, really, as long as you have an internet search engine handy.… (mehr)