THE HISTORY NEWS: EXPLORERS

Cast as one of a 3,000-year-old newspaper's series of retrospective issues on particular topics, this gathers fabricated interviews, memoirs, on-the-scene reports, obituaries, and even advertisements (``KEEP ON COURSE: Has your compass been letting you down?'') for a peculiar view of the history of Earth's exploration, from the Polynesian expansion 2,500 years ago to Jacques Piccard's 1960 descent into the Marianas Trench. Although Sacajawea, Mary Kingsley, Chang Chi'en and Seedy Mubarik Bombay join the usual cast of adventurers, the information here is all thoroughly recycled, and sometimes questionable—Peary may never actually have reached the North Pole, for instance—while the approach is quaintly Eurocentric: All dates are in b.c. or a.d., there are no non-European explorers on the world map, and Livingstone ``was the first explorer to . . . see the Victoria Falls.'' With well-leaded texts and full-color illustrations, the pages look nothing like a newspaper's, but that's not the only time the conceit falters. (index, not seen, maps, diagrams, charts, chronology) (Nonfiction. 8-10)