I really, really liked this book. It's a large hardcover with huge, full-page illustrations—like Animalia, if you remember that. I think they're perfect, because you can get as much information out of them as you want; you can just read the text and glance over the pictures (which is what I did this afternoon), or you can spend a long time looking at all the details.

The book goes through ten cities in ten different centuries, and there are several different kinds of illustrations: a sort of 3-D shot of the section of the globe that contains the city, a page with pictures of individual people or objects / a corresponding page with diagrams, and then full-page scenes of a scene in the city. On those big single-scene pages, around the borders, there are small rectangles with bits of information about what was going on in the rest of the world at the time, and I just love that context. ( )

This book tells a history of the primarily European and Asian world for the past thousand years. New York City is the last city covered, and a city in Africa is mentioned (though only through the context of European exploration), and occationally New World events are mentioned, but this really is a Eurasian history. The history is told through pictures of cities with important landmarks and general facts focused on. Each city's story is told with historical and cultural facts. A few pictures are drawn not drawn with historical accuracy, so be on the lookout. ( )