The Essential World History, Enhanced Edition, Volume 2
"The book’s preface and "Themes for Understanding World History" clearly lay out the authors’ vision, and the authors implement it brilliantly. Duiker and Spielvogel are to be commended for their concise, crisp style and their honest interpretation of evidence. … Duiker and Spielvogel have an innovative and original approach to world history, and the way they portray the gradual shift from isolated societies to a global society works extremely well.""The author’s approach is consistent throughout the text, and they have achieved their stated goal of adopting a ’global approach to world history while at the same time attempting to do justice to the distinctive character and development of individual civilizations and regions of the world.’""I like the book, it has a clear vision of the progress of world history and the combination of text, documents and illustrations is good. The up to date appearance of the later chapters is especially good. In fact, I haven’t seen some of the documents and or text in other texts.""In looking through the text, it’s clear that the authors and publishers went all-out to give students as broad an exposure to the world as they possibly could, to present the material attractively, and to provide a wide array of useful study aids and supplementary material. I am particularly impressed by the unusually large amount of space devoted to non-Western subjects, particularly as compared with other texts (as above) with which I am familiar. … This particular text comes as close to my ideal as any I have encountered, so I most likely will seriously consider adopting it when a new edition comes out.""I was impressed by the way the text had been slimmed down.  If we could work out a three-semester split, the slimmed own version would give us the ability to use more outside readings, something we like to do. The primary source documents are quite relevant to the text in this edition and I liked them."--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.