I just finished "The Birth of the Modern" - it's a great book, but takes work to read. Johnson skips around the world of 1815-1830 - the end of the Napoleonic age, and the beginning of the Industrial world. It's mostly Europe, and of that, mostly England - but there's coverage of Russia, the far east, the US, and South America as well. I enjoyed the book, and feel like I have a better grasp of that era now - I'd like to find something good that covers European history between the fall of Napolean and the revolutions of 1848 next. In the meantime, I'm continuing my eclectic reading patterns by picking up a book I got quite some time ago - Tuchman's "A Distant Mirror", which covers Europe in the 14th century. I'm reading her "The Guns of August" as a bedside book, so I know her prose style already.