Summer Reading: 'A Little History of the World'

This summer, I read a book that taught me about everything, ever.

Okay, maybe not “everything, ever,” but certainly “a little bit of most major historical events of the world.” I’m referring to a book titled “A Little History of the World,” a tour-de-force by art historian Sir Ernst H. Gombrich.

What sets this little gem — just 284 pages in my copy — apart from other history books that you’ve used as makeshift pillows is that Gombrich was writing for an audience of children. This is evident in his storybook tone, the beautiful artwork, as well as the short chapters designed for juvenile attention spans. However, the final product is neither patronizing nor elementary. Instead, rather like its title, “A Little History of the World” is hugely ambitious and endearing at the same time.

But why should oh-so-educated college students who sleep four hours a night find time to read a children’s book about world history? Well, let’s be real. If you haven’t been in a conversation here in which you barely managed to pretend that you understood all the historical references, you will soon.

Conveniently, Gombrich has compiled a table of contents that quite literally encompasses all of world history, from “Earth without life” to “Nirvana” to “Napoleon in Corsica” to “Japan in 1850.” Even more impressively, he presents every period, however notorious, with both a sense of humor and a fairytale tenor. As a result, you come across sentences informing you that, “One day — but there’s no hurry — you may come to read the Bible. Nowhere else will you find so many stories about ancient times so vividly told.”

The benefit of this being a children’s book is that Gombrich’s optimism, even in the gloomiest of narratives, never comes off as forced or naïve. His target audience also gives him a free pass for not going into every detail. Some long-lived conflicts, such as the American Civil War, are summarized in a manner of paragraphs. Rather than acting as a textbook, Gombrich renders a more panoramic view of collective human patterns, errors, and achievements. He simplifies but does not neglect.

I should add a disclaimer: despite its broad range, Gombrich’s account is still a Eurocentric one — namely, his origin of continental Western Europe. After all, the book had been written in Austrian, for Austrian children. Nevertheless, it is not without frequent glimpses “across the seas.” There are, additionally, many moments that force you to broaden your views when you least expect it. An example: “The book you have in your hand is made of paper, something we also owe to the Arabs, who themselves learnt how to make it from Chinese prisoners of war.”

What really won me over in the end was just that, the ending — Gombrich’s sobering final chapter on “the small part of the history of the world which I have lived through myself.” Here, he arrives at the history of Hitler’s reign, from which he himself narrowly escaped. His account is written with care and with pain, and he reminds us — characteristically, through an anecdote about a Buddhist monk — that “one can be attached to one’s own country without needing to insist that the rest of the world’s inhabitants are worthless.” And he could not have said it better.

To me, Gombrich embodies the study of history not as a static list of trivia, but a continuous process of discovery, of readjusting viewpoints and of building tolerance.

So do yourself a favor: go buy this book. Maybe you won’t read it right away, but just keep it somewhere visible. And one day, the tempting title (and hopefully, the lingering memory of this article) may be enough for you to stop what you’re doing, pick up this little volume, and learn — even if just a little — about the world we live in.