Thought I'd briefly report back on the Gombrich "Little History", which came last week. We've been reading it aloud to all three kids, and it has been extremely popular (as in begging for another chapter at bedtime--go figure! Harpo also takes off with it and reads it by himself.) It's a lovely read-aloud: the prose flows like water.
The tone is warm and conversational--one might say avuncular, in fact--and while the author acknowledges some of the difficult (violent, bloody) aspects of history, he doesn't dwell on them, so my quite sensitive children have not been having nightmares about Genghis Khan, for instance. The coverage is from prehistoric man to just after the Great War, with a postscript chapter dealing with World War II. Obviously, with such a broad sweep, you'll have to go elsewhere for depth (though he does linger a little over some obvious personal favourites--the ancient Greeks, Confucius, the Enlightenment philosophers--prejudices I happen to share, so I was happy!), but what we were wanting was a compact sense of the big picture, which is exactly what we got.
Hope that helps somebody--
peace
minnie
