If you're looking for a summary of geological and paleontological history of the world (though with a bit more of a focus on North America) this is an excellent way to learn it. Plenty of figures and fairly engaging to read. It is still a textbook, but it really does have the history of Earth through time.
My only complaints are that some of the calculations in the book were clearly done wrong for subjects outside of geology. The amount of helium produced by the sun, the volume of the protonebula for the solar system, and some cases where it would need to be "billion billion" rather than "billion" to be accurate. Perhaps these are pedantic points, in that the point of the textbook was to emphasize the largeness of some values, but with a physics/mathematics background I cannot just let them stand.