If you are looking for a beautiful and informative coffee table book for your history buff, look no further than National Geographic's Ultimate Visual History of the World. Filled with gorgeous pictures, fascinating archaeological finds, maps, and more and accompanied by easily understandable text, the book spans from prehistory to today showing human history throughout the ages. It is broken into different ages: bronze, iron, discovery, modern, etc. Each section showcases the major advancements of the era, the changes in the human condition (rise/fall of cities, inventions, war, cultures, faith, and so on), and just how these things remade, and continue to remake, our world.

The text is illuminated and enhanced by the chosen images. Much of the information will be on things that interested readers learned in a world history class but if it's been a while since they've been in a class, it is a concise reminder of previous learning. I thoroughly enjoyed the early chapters for refreshing my memory on the things I learned in geology and history of life classes in college many years ago. And it is fascinating to see so clearly the way that our history, the history of the entire world, all the people on all of the continents, is one large tapestry woven together rather than disparate civilizations in a vaccuum. The book pulls everything into one piece, rather than examining it as seperate occurrences, so that it is clear how all of history has built upon that which came before. There is, of course a lot toward the end of the book, given that we know our own recent past the best, and it remains to be seen how what we are experiencing today will change the world, but it is important to see ourselves in the continuum of humankind's history as this book clearly shows. It's a beautiful and ambitious book that can and will keep the reader immersed for hours. ( )