A Short History of the World

It moves at the pace of continents. Ice sheets reach the Thames while mammoths drift across cold steppes. Sumer and Egypt raise their first cities and scratch the first writing. In the sixth century B.C., an awakening seems to happen everywhere at once: Buddha teaching at Benares, Confucius dying convinced of his own failure, Greek philosophers questioning the universe without a priest's permission. Thinkers who never met, gathered here into one sweeping current.

Wells writes with a clear, reflective eye, disentangling the jumble of half-remembered history. Caesar and Cleopatra, Columbus dying without ever grasping what he had found, Napoleon crowning himself in deliberate echo of Charlemagne. He is drawn to the hinges of chance, the way an empire's fate can turn on the death of a distant khan, and to the astonishing speed of the machine age, which in barely a century tore up the ancient ceiling on how fast a person could travel.

By the end it reaches the wreckage of the Great War and the unfinished hopes that followed. "Man is still only adolescent," Wells writes — and the whole vast span behind that line is what makes it feel less like a verdict than an open door.