I know. It's a pretty naive question. History is so multifaceted it would be hard to contain even the main events of a single war in a few volumes...and here I am, asking for the whole damned world to be stuffed in a couple attractive books.
But still I ask.
Barring that, is there just a book on history -anything from antiquity on up- that blows your hair back? I just like to learn.
Thanks to any and all.
By the way, I'm a teacher, so where you direct my attention will impact the lives of others as well. I love to toss in anecdotes from this and that. Cheers!
The book that comes immediately to mind is A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. It acts as a very engaging trip through the evolution of the modern sciences and how the development of different scientific disciplines affected the world. How people reacted to the emergence of new ideas throughout human history is surprisingly engaging. The book meets your criteria of being written for the layperson, well written - this is an understatement - and engaging.
For twentieth century narrative history, I'd recommend The Age of Extremes by Eric Hobsbawm. Martin Gilbert's year-by-year three volume set A History of the Twentieth Century is also very good.
If your interests lie 2000 years earlier, Robin Lane Fox's The Classical World provides a good 1 volume survey of the Greek and Roman world.
Other authors worth looking out for include Simon Winchester, Simon Schama, Barbara Tuchman and Dava Sobel.
The problem is that broad histories tend to be text books, I haven't seen a well written "complete" history book since it's hard to even find well written history books about an entire nation/people/and sometimes even specific event in history... I'm just saying that it's a tall order to have all of that in a very easy book or book series. If you want, we could narrow down specific time periods and regions, there are a few books on Rome or France I could recommend but they're specific to my time period and they're broad as it is...
How's Kenneth Davis' Don't Know Much About History rated? It's specifically American, but has some pretty good anecdotes, and connects this thing to the next thing to that thing over there pretty well.
I enjoyed reading it, at any rate....