What’s Her Name: A History of the World in 80 Lost Women is exactly the book I would have expected from the creators of the popular  What’sHerName podcast. Olivia Meikle and Katie Nelson not only tell the stories of forgotten women with their trademark combination of wit, enthusiasm and rock-solid research, they use those stories as a lens to re-examine world history as it is usually taught, and re-create it in the process

At first glance, the structure of the book will look familiar to anyone who took World History in an American high school: the stone age, first civilizations, ancient empires, the Middle Ages, etc etc etc., ending with the atomic age. The story told within those chapters takes that structure, spins it around, holds it upside down and shake it until things fall out of its pockets. The result is dizzying, and enlightening. Olivia and Katie re-examine familiar stories from a new perspective. (I’ll never look at the Venus of Willendorf the same way again. And I refuse to say more because —spoilers.) They introduce us to women who don’t make it into standard world history texts, despite playing important roles in the big picture.* (The Trung sisters of Vietnam, for instance.) They tell us the stories of women who made discoveries, who stood up in resistance, and who simply led their lives in ways that tell us more about their time and place. In the process, they question some of the truths about history that have seemed self-evident, and find slightly different answers. Bigger answers.

What’s Her Name is funny, subversive (in the best possible way), and very, very smart.  To quote one of my favorite lines in the book, it is a history of the world with “Less patriarchy, more elephants.”

*Though they are beginning to make their way into books written for a popular audience, like my own Women Warriors—a fact that Olivia and Katie acknowledge with thanks on the first page of the book.