Reading a book composed entirely of excerpts from textbooks may seem an unpromising activity, but history texts reveal much about national perspectives and prejudices: They are more expressive than government pronouncements; they get into matters diplomats avoid; and yet, as the authors note, they are in varying degrees state-sanctioned and thus official, or semi-official, stories about the national past. Most reflect public attitudes; all help to create those attitudes because they are the most widely read histories in each country, and because kids read them during the formative adolescent years. What students remember from their reading is not, of course, so clear. (It’s certainly not clear in the United States, where history texts run to 1,200 pages and weigh about four pounds.) Still the texts have an authority that books by individual historians lack, for, even in the best school systems, teachers, in their desperate attempt to drum in a few names and dates, rarely question their points of view, and students hazily come to regard what they read as the truth.