I picked up this book on Amazon and also read it during January.  I have to admit that, given that it touches on two of my favourite subjects: history and languages, I absolutely loved it.  The insight it gave on the history of the speakers of languages such as Chinese, Dutch or Akkadian was totally riveting, and it was written in such an amenable way I couldn't put it down.  The text examples of each language in the beginning of the appropriate chapter was a great technique for introducing them and the author shows he definitely knows what he's writing about.

The only thing that put me off a little bit was its slight English-language bias, which is anyway not unexpected given that the writer is a native English speaker, and the book is written in English.  Regardless, one of the best books I've read in a long, long time.