In 300+ pages here, 60,000 years of history is covered - well, at least the more intriguing parts. This is a truncated look at the history of man from 60,000 BCE to current times. The whole of humankind has been broken down into a number of chapters including Africa and After, There's No Place Like Rome, War and Slavery, and If You Thought the Last Depression Was Great... Within each chapter are sub-headings such as In a Nutshell (a distillation) and What Happened When (a chronology).

This is history for the non-reader, and it does deliver the facts in a fun and economical fashion. Here, for example, is the first paragraph from a chapter entitled "The Age of Liberation, Fragmentation, Stagnation, and Plain Ol' Nations (1750-1900)."

"In the second half of the eighteenth century, a wave of revolutions changed the world forever. It began in 1776 in North America, where the colonists kicked out the Brits and established a new, democratic nation with a framework - the Constitution - based on a crazy concept: simple reason."

You may read this cover to cover, but The Mental Floss History of the World is also the type of book you might pull out to regale friends or to simply find some new and intriguing facts about life on earth.