Children's book printed in English

NEW YORK -- Seventy years after it was rushed into print, a history book beloved by readers of all ages around the world is finally coming out in English.\nE.H. Gombrich, the scholar best known for his classic, "The Story of Art," was a 26-year-old scholar in 1935 when a British publisher asked for his opinion of a children's history book, which was supposed to be translated into Gombrich's native German.\nGombrich was bored by the text, and thought he could do better. The publisher, Walter Neurath, took him on, but on one condition: Gombrich had just six weeks to finish the job.\nUnemployed at the time, he worked hard on his tour of the ages through the eyes of a child: He set a goal of doing a chapter a day, read passages aloud to his wife, Ilse, and tapped into the narrative voice he had recently developed when he tried to explain his doctoral thesis to the daughter of family friends.\nWhat seemed like a rush job was treated by reviewers and the general public as an admirable, accessible summary. "A Little History of the World" was an instant success and has been translated into 18 languages, selling hundreds of thousands of copies.\nBut for decades there was no English translation, even though Gombrich spent much of his life in London and wrote his other books in English. During those years, he was busy with other projects and thought "A Little History" more of interest to European readers. Only late in life did he get around to the English text.\nHe died in 2001, at age 92, and left an unfinished manuscript.\n"That book was always part of what he called his split personality," says his granddaughter and literary executor, Leonie Gombrich.\n"On one hand he had this persona as a serious scholar. Yet, here's this book, where it's him pretending that he's talking to a child. It was a sort of secret delight, this kind of hidden life."\nWorking with translator Caroline Mustill, Leonie Gombrich completed and edited the text, which comes out this fall from the Yale University Press with a first printing of 25,000 each in the United States and England, a high number for an academic publisher. It was an admittedly humbling task, but one made easier, she says, by her grandfather's talent and character.\nBorn in Vienna in 1909, Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich was a teacher at Oxford University and at the University of London and director of London's Warburg Institute. But "A Little History" was written for the untenured ear, suggesting a grown-up placing his hand on a child's shoulder and explaining the facts of life.\n"A Little History" is fewer than 300 pages and its 40 chapters move quickly from Earth's formation to the Cold War era, touching upon ancient Greece and Rome, the rise of Christianity, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, technology and world wars.\nThe book is meant to inform and to raise questions. The Nazis banned "A Little History" because they thought it was too pacifist; Gombrich questions the meaning of war, and champions what he calls the principles of the Enlightenment: "tolerance, reason and humanity."\nGombrich attempts to address the violence of history without unduly upsetting his readers. "If I wished, I could write many more chapters on the wars between the Catholics and the Protestants," he writes of the 17th-century religious conflicts. "But I won't."\nHe likens the fall of the Roman Empire to a horrific summer storm, "especially spectacular in the mountains," and introduces the "Dark Ages" by imagining a black sky brightened by stars - his metaphor for the rise of Christianity and the belief that "all were equal" in God's eyes.\n"A Little History" is a story of progress contending with, and, hopefully, overcoming our darker selves. \nAs he revised the book over the years, he remained convinced that life could get better, even after the Holocaust, which he calls "such a painful step backwards" and all the more reason "for us to respect and tolerate each other."\nBut his granddaughter doesn't know what he believed at the end of his life. The historian, who had been ill in his latter years, died just two months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.\n"He had this tremendous faith in the civilizing forces, in the power of ideas, that there would always be people who carry on with the Enlightenment," Leonie Gombrich says.\n"But he was incredibly depressed by the attacks. After 9-11, he stopped work and never went back"