World History, Renaissance to present

[Susan C.]

Here's the deal, we are sick of the world history textbook. I pulled out WTM, and it suggested history books by Paul Johnson. There is another book about Asian History (is it good?). I looked at a few samples of two books that Paul Johnson has written on Amazon, and I don't this will work for dd. I do have Human Odyssey, but am intimidated at its size (it can still be a possibility). I keep coming up with great recommendations for US History, but that is next year.

Anything readable, not extremely hard, that we can use to cover the rest of world history? (And, why do books we seemed to have liked for previous children look so "not wonderful" now??)

Thanks!

[Chris in VA]

We used Spielvogel's other book, Western Civ, for that portion of history. I've heard Human Odyssey is good.
When we got to 20th century, I found WC to be too light. We were doing Sonlight 300 and using DK's 20th Cent Day by Day. I supplemented with Martin Gilbert's books. THey go year by year thru the century--little commentary or connections, but pretty fascinating and very readable. The first two books (one of which is linked here (http://www.amazon.com/History-Twentieth-Century-1933-1951/dp/0380713942/ref=pd_sim_b_1)) helped us get more detail of what was happening in the first 5 decades or so of the 20th cent.