The Story of Mankind (A Liveright Book) (origineel 1921; editie 1994)

This is a bit of a monster of children's book to delve into, especially as the first Newbery winner. (It posed as a hard blockade to overcome when I tried to read the Newberies as a child.) Given the subject material, I consider this written decently. There's nothing too heavy, so a child could climb this mountain if they did it in small bits. And maps are always fun. There are certainly better, more thorough ways to learn history, but this isn't an awful summary for what it is. (The author clearly states he's ignoring Asia, and that is important history that requires another book.)
I did find it a mite frustrating when the topics I did want to know more about were only a few pages long. A lot of subjects are simplified or glided over. In the copy I read, I also found the “updates” to make the history hit the 1980s very sloppy. In one chapter, it’s “The Great War” and in the next, it’s “World War I”. I expected a smoother read as it bounced between authors. The updaters (two, in my case) left the book on sour note. ( )

NA

RG-3

A while back I was reading some Xkcd and became intrigued by a quote that goes as follows:
"HIGH Up in the North in the land called Svithjod, there stands a rock. It is a hundred miles high and a hundred miles wide. Once every thousand years a little bird comes to this rock to sharpen its beak.
When the rock has thus been worn away, then a single day of eternity will have gone by."
I thought it was really poetic and decided to find the book to which it belonged. I was successful in doing so and have now completed the book in a day or so.

First off, this book is a bit below my level of reading. Secondly, it was written in 1922 and the version I found was not updated. Thus there are a number of things, small things, that the author got wrong. Most of these are tolerable since it was written for children during a time in which racism was acceptable. Thirdly, it skims over most of our history. This too is acceptable since a lot of the stuff we know about ancient races has to be conjecture due to the fact that few historical works are extant. Finally, this book is very Eurocentric. In his defense he states that most of the history of the world was done where history was written, but I don't really think that is a comfort to the people inhabiting China, Japan, Korea, India, and countries in Africa...

Of course, with such a wide subject matter as the history of the whole human race, some sacrifices have to be made or the book could span thousands of pages and dozens of volumes. So this book is good in terms of what it is supposed to be; a primer on history for children. It isn't fantastically amazing, but it is apparent that the author has a love of history and is trying to instill that in the reader.

PS: Most of the time I slogged through it by pretending it was narrated by the late Leonard Nimoy of Star Trek fame, but that is neither here nor there. ( )

The is book was written in 1921 with a quick follow up by others than Van Loon that brings the history up to 2000. It is interesting to read a book about history that ends almost 90 years ago. It is more of a history of Europe and Western Civilization. Van Loon does explain why he included things and not other things. It was written for young adults so it is simplistic but that is what makes it accessible. A good book for young people to read but they probably won't because of when it was written. We had this book in our book shelf so I grabbed it to read on a trip to Paris. Reading this while in Europe was great because you were in the place where this history occurred. Not sure if I would recommend this book but would recommend that all Americans read more about history. ( )