A very serviceable, if not always supremely readable history of the game. 

Yuri Averbakh does a really good job carefully separating out fact from speculation, and even differentiates between scholarly debate and his own personal feelings about certain theories. 

It's compact, but manages to pack in a lot of detail without getting too, too lost in the weeds. 

As it states in the title, this is a broad history, with each chapter moving us closer to the present, but also broken down into sub-preoccupations: the evolution of the rules, the game pieces, the look of the board, the place of chess within different historical contexts. 

In other words, it's a great jumping off point with a good bibliography to branch out into.