An enticingly depicted intro to human history and archaeology, simply expressed but extensive and engaging.
From the author of the adult title Sapiens (2015), an explanation of how physically weak humans came to dominate other animals.
Spoiler alert: It was through human inventiveness and storytelling. Harari’s lively, reader-directed prose and Ruiz’s expressive graphics will help young readers grasp an almost-unimaginably distant past, from the start of toolmaking up to (in this volume) Homo sapiens’ collaborative extinction of mammoths. The text is dramatically punctuated by large and small illustrations. Ingenious use of perspective, imaginative details, and relevance to the text make the artwork integral to this book’s appeal. Most of the illustrations depict cheerful, brown-skinned humans. Bolded sentences in different colors break up text blocks and point to big ideas and questions. Humor is effectively deployed, and concepts like evolution, DNA, and religion are compared to kid-adjacent phenomena (to help kids grapple with the idea of human cooperation, for instance, the author asks readers to imagine all the people, from students to teachers to cafeteria workers to the people who create textbooks, who make a school possible), connected to the next topic, and paced to appeal to middle-grade readers. When an answer isn’t known, Harari admits, “We don’t know.”
An enticingly depicted intro to human history and archaeology, simply expressed but extensive and engaging. (timeline, map, resources, index) (Nonfiction. 10-13)Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-64346-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Bright Matter Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
An introduction to ancient Egypt and the Pharaohs buried in the Valley of the Kings. The authors begin with how archaeologist Howard Carter found the tomb of King Tut, then move back 3,000 years to the time of Thutmosis I, who built the first tomb in the Valley of the Kings. Finally they describe the building of the tomb of a later Pharaoh, Ramses II. The backward-forward narration is not always easy to follow, and the authors attribute emotions to the Pharaohs without citation. For example, “Thutmosis III was furious [with Hatshepsut]. He was especially annoyed that she planned to be buried in KV 20, the tomb of her father.” Since both these people lived 3,500 years ago, speculation on who was furious or annoyed should be used with extreme caution. And the tangled intrigue of Egyptian royalty is not easily sorted out in so brief a work. Throughout, though, there are spectacular photographs of ancient Egyptian artifacts, monuments, tomb paintings, jewels, and death masks that will appeal to young viewers. The photographs of the exposed mummies of Ramses II, King Tut, and Seti I are compelling. More useful for the hauntingly beautiful photos than the text. (brief bibliography, index) (Nonfiction. 10-12)
Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7922-7223-4
Page Count: 64
Publisher: National Geographic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Bial (A Handful of Dirt, p. 299, etc.) conjures up ghostly images of the Wild West with atmospheric photos of weathered clapboard and a tally of evocative names: Tombstone, Deadwood, Goldfield, Progress, Calamity Jane, Wild Bill Hickock, the OK Corral. Tracing the life cycle of the estimated 30,000 ghost towns (nearly 1300 in Utah alone), he captures some echo of their bustling, rough-and-tumble past with passages from contemporary observers like Mark Twain: “If a man wanted a fight on his hands without any annoying delay, all he had to do was appear in public in a white shirt or stove-pipe hat, and he would be accommodated.” Among shots of run-down mining works, dusty, deserted streets, and dark eaves silhouetted against evening skies, Bial intersperses 19th-century photos and prints for contrast, plus an occasional portrait of a grizzled modern resident. He suggests another sort of resident too: “At night that plaintive hoo-hoo may be an owl nesting in a nearby saguaro cactus—or the moaning of a restless ghost up in the graveyard.” Children seeking a sense of this partly mythic time and place in American history, or just a delicious shiver, will linger over his tribute. (bibliography) (Nonfiction. 9-11)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-618-06557-1
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2001
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