wodehousing

In these big-fonted and illustrated 300 pages are comprised centuries of Human history. You’d think this would mean the book is terribly awful, but it’s not! It’s apparently a book written for children, which I hadn’t known when I started reading it. This made me judge it from a perspective of a little kid instead of the nerdy History student that I am.
The writing is very simple and clear, the author “talks to reader”, asking questions and forming reminders throughout the book. It’s very nice indeed and I kept thinking I could totally give this to a kid and they’d understand every word of it. I already knew most of the things explained here, but that’s because I’ve been taking European and World History classes in school since I was ten. However, in school we do not really learn about the Orient, like India and China and Japan, which I don’t get at all, because they’re awesome.
If I didn’t have previous knowledge of all this, I’d been awed, and I still was, mostly because of the authors own enthusiasm. The only thing that saddened me about this was that about 70% of it was about wars and religion, which I get are a very important part of History, but I also think it would be nice if kids could get a bigger glimpse in how life was back then, in terms of customs and traditions. Reading about war tactics is a bit of snooze fest. Also, why so little Portugal? We found out about India and Brazil, why did we only get a little paragraph telling how horrible we were? And there was a severe lack of Tudors, severe!
Regardless, I really enjoyed reading it, and would recommend it to anyone who wants a little one in their lives to know a bit more about the past.
Read from July 2nd to July 8th, 2010.