A History of the 20th Century

Conflict, Technology and Revolution

By: Jeremy Black

Narrated by: Richard Trinder

From one of the world's leading historians comes an ambitious and sweeping history of the world in the 20th century.

Spanning from the world wars to the space race and the birth of the internet, A History of the 20th Century documents the events, the characters, the ideologies, the cultural transformations and the dramatic politics of these turbulent times.

Jeremy Black examines subjects as diverse as the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression, the Cold War, the Iranian Revolution and decolonization in a compelling narrative. Keen to highlight the role of demographics, the environment, culture and technology as well as the better-known tales of political rivalries, he brings a new perspective to this most important subject.

©2022 Arcturus Holdings Limited (P)2024 Arcturus Publishing & ID Audio

A global look at history

In Highschool, I never enjoyed the huge amount of details and dates we had to learn by heart about very regionally limited aspects of history.
So I thought it would be fun to take in history in a different format, and an opportunity to close any gaps I had to due that previous aversion.
This book looks at global history and the greater connections, and I enjoyed that very much. Performance is good and pretty matter of fact, as you’d expect for a non fiction history book.

Informative.

Well done and narrated. It could have used something to break up the history book tediousness though.

Compact overview of the century

Manages to bundle mainlines of history and many aspects of it in the short bundle. Overall I appreciated the result even though it mostly just scratched the surface and was quite west centric. The reader fits the subject matter well and my only grief was that there were sections that sounded like they were originally info boxes and stuck out tumbling the flow of the book

Good, but leaves you wanting more

Disclaimer: I was provided a free copy of this title for review.

A history buff looking for something new should probably pass on this title, but this is great for entry level history fans or even just listeners/readers that aren't familiar with some decades. it touches on the important parts of each decade and tries to create a detailed picture of the century, but at the end of the day it just feels like the author decided he would dedicate an hour to each decade and that would be good enough.

At times I felt myself going "oooh, something interesting", only for the fact to end and move on to the next tidbit. perhaps I'm being too unfair to this book. It did the best it could in the length that it was-- I just wish it had been longer.

Solid Historical Summarization

It took me a while to actually get through this. It very briefly skims such massive historical periods that there are scant details for a lot of the historical events that comprise this text. I found myself having to pause frequently so I could look up more detail on the periods that were being discussed. It's basically like viewing 100 years of history via bullet points.

A small nitpick would be the narrator. They sort of droned on and were mostly unenthused throughout the narration. They also clearly mispronounced things quite a few times. Overall it was a decent audiobook, I would just anticipate needing to reference or search for more detail on the topics that actually interest you. There were a few things I did not remember from history classes that were nice to get a refersher on.