A molecular biologist I met at an event yesterday asked me to recommend a few books for someone who doesn’t know much about human history or culture. He mentioned that he’d recently enjoyed E.H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art. He’d been stunned by it, actually. Through it, he’d glimpsed realms of knowledge that felt completely foreign. This was the kind of book he had in mind – an accessible introduction, basically, to all of human history. On the spot, I struggled to come up with a list. There’s Gombrich’s own A Little History of the World, but that was published in 1935. Some friends were reading Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind earlier this year, and seemed to enjoy it. Maybe Will and Ariel Durant’s The Lessons of History, or Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything? Next time, I’ll be ready for the question. It’s just that I’ve never read any of these myself.