History: The Definitive Visual Guide (DK Definitive Visual Encyclopedias) Hardcover – April 25, 2023

Beautiful, high quality book. Tons of info & pictures.

5 stars

Great quality with loads of information. Was a perfect gift for a young teenager.

…For a book that big. Extra care is needed to prevent it from ripping. In fact, the first copy I received had the back cover torn ¾ up from the bottom. I can see how that would be easy to do.As far as the content goes, we’ve got another “par for the course” DK release: Excellent photography, meticulous research, fun and concise reading with a team of people to put it all together. Impressive work. That’s why I don’t understand how they don’t have a “test the binding” person.There’s a lot of information contained in these pages. What I liked is not only do you get timelines as expected, but there is considerable attention given to culture and mindset too. This is important to my mind and often omitted in history books. My favorite section is National Histories. A great way to become aware of significant events throughout history.The book is so good it’s almost worth putting-up with the poor binding issue. However, if I were to purchase this book knowing what I know now, I would wait to see if the next printing has a better binding. If not, I would look for a first edition copy, simply because I don’t like books in poor condition. You need to wear kid gloves when reading them, as to not make the condition worse. Not my idea of fun.

It is a very beautiful book

Excellent read

The photos and art that illustrated the whole book made it a good reference.

The book has little to offer other than a number of loosely connected (but well illustrated!) historical topics and themes that seem randomly chosen (e.g., "The Art of Communication", "Village Life", "Metals", "Sickness & Health", "A Wider World", "Diffusion of Knowledge", "Science vs God", "City Living", "The Troubles", etc). As such, and despite its volume of over 600 pages, it doesn't go deep an any topic and there are glaring omissions.- Want to learn about the Holy Roman Empire? Not mentioned in the book.- Charlemagne? One short paragraph.- Austrian Hungarian Empire? Not mentioned once in the 600+ pages.Also, after flipping through the book for just a few days, the binding is already falling apart.