Others say...

"Excellent book to close the line of the 3rd edition realms"
Okay, let's first get the art out of the way. Indeed the only pieces of original art in this book are the cover -which is a beautiful work of art- and the maps of the empires of old. And personally, I didn't like the art style of those maps. The forests on them were very detailed, while the mountains were not, and the rest of the maps (desert, plains, water) had no detail at all (just one bland colour).
BUT, important to know for the fans is, how come? Why did they only re-use existing art? The designers went on a leap with this book. They knew some hardcore fans would want it, but they weren't at all sure about the general public. So they got a very tight budget to work with. The book took a lot of writing work, being filled from front to back with one humongous small print timeline, plus all sidebars. Naturally, a very very low art budget was left. They decided to spend all of that little money on the new maps, as they would be most important, and re-use existing art to fill up the rest.
I think they made a wise decision at that.

The rest of the book: The timeline is complete. After a one page foreword, and a one page introduction and guide for calendar conversion (ex: the Mulhorandi calendar starts with the founding of Skuld) they jump right in at -35.000 Dale Reckoning. They cover the empires of the creator races first and go all the way through the history we know, and further. They end in 1385, thus giving sneak peaks into the 10 years that still have to come; to show a glimpse of the events that will have taken place between the 3rd and 4th edition realms.

Halfway through the book they give some pause from reading the extensive timeline, by giving lists of lines of monarchies from various dynasties in Faerun. Somewhat like the lineages in the appendices of Lord of the Rings. Throughout the rest of the book, sidebars with stories take over this function. These stories are mostly written in character. So during the crown wars, you may run into an excerpt from the lore gem of house Aelryth of Miyeritar. Later you read the lecture about the Dawn Cataclysm, by a priest of Lathander. etc
A minor nitpick on these, is that many are written in hand written fonts. A minority of these ended up on backgrounds that made them somewhat hard to read. The majority were just fine though.

One final sometimes handy tool they added to the timeline, are dates attached to certain names. These dates point to the previous and following year in which that same name is mentioned. So if you are trying to trace one particular chain of events throughout the timeline, this tool will greatly help you.

Lastly, the writers give some new information on various events, scattered throughout the timeline. One of the sidebars throws an interesting light on how the sundering created Evermeet for example.

"Best Forgotten Realms DM Tool Ever"
The book is excellent it contains numerous references from across all edition and original content! It also clarifies dates that were previously in flux. It also has new historical maps! It also the result of many years of work from a Forgotten Realms fan, posting it online till it was discovered by Wizards.

It does have cons. The book lacks original art, aside from the new maps, having reused art from older 3E books there is even a warforged in one picture, ugh. The original online version also had color coding and endnote notation for sources on each entry.

Even with those minor faults the books is still a 5 star worthy.

"A sweeping history that falls short"
For fans of the Forgotten Realms, this product collects the multiple timelines and rolls of years from a wide range of products, but falls short of being a "Grand History." Admittedly, with close to 40,000 years to go through, the editors couldn't apply much detail to each individual year or date. The book doesn't break much (if any) new ground, however. The information listed in the book is, by and large, available in other Forgotten Realms products. If you already own a substantial number of Forgotten Realms books, odds are good that you currently possess a timeline that is analogous to the one provided here. Even the artwork used in the book is reprinted from other Wizards of the Coast products. This product does have sidebar comments, snippets of information or stories pertaining to this or that particular date in Realms history, but too often those vignettes are incomplete, or hint at information that isn't provided in the book, or otherwise leave the reader thinking, "Yes, well, what about it?" If the reader wants an established timeline of the Realms in one place, then this book is what they are looking for, but avoid it if you are looking for more depth of information or anything really "new."

"No Salvatore story!"
I have not read this book, so I can't rate the content (hence a 3-star, middle-of-the-road rating). But I wanted to make sure everyone knows that, despite the product description, there is *NOT* a story by R.A. Salvatore included. I don't know if it was dropped at the last minute or where this info came from, but I just paged through the whole book looking for it, and it's not there. Hopefully Amazon will update their information soon.

If the book looked appealing to you for other reasons, then, by all means, get it. But if you only (or primarily) wanted it for the short story, you're better off waiting a few days for the new novel.