A Child's History of the World

Rating:
Summary: Incredible book. Extremely detailed.
Review: I am almost 70 years old and have never forgotten how much I enjoyed it when my third grade teacher read it to our class a chapter at a time along about l936. I now have 7 grandchildren and recently was able to find and purchase a used copy . This book gave me a sense of the history of the world at a very young age and I hope it will do the same for them. I rank it in the top five books I have ever read.

Rating:
Summary: Good book
Review: I read this to my kids last year and they enjoyed it. It presents world history in small, manageable bites for kids ages 8 and up...

Rating:
Summary: Good book
Review: I read this to my kids last year and they enjoyed it. It presents world history in small, manageable bites for kids ages 8 and up...

Rating:
Summary: Incredible book. Extremely detailed.
Review: I think this was a great book. The only flaw was that it talks to much about Jesus Christ. Great detail was used in this book. Reccomended to anyone. Don't read any one part. Long,long,long, book. 512 pages. Covers from Stone Age to nowadays. Great.

Rating:
Summary: Fabulous!
Review: This book is a true classic which our whole family enjoys. It sparks the imagination in a way that only few books can. I recommend this book to everyone and it should be included as required reading at the elementary or even junior high level. One thing you should realize is that this is a book without a lot of "fluff", no color drawings, etc., but still better than the majority of newer discussions of history. I didn't find it to be either pro-Christianity or anti-Christianity.

Rating:
Summary: Fabulous!
Review: This book is a true classic which our whole family enjoys. It sparks the imagination in a way that only few books can. I recommend this book to everyone and it should be included as required reading at the elementary or even junior high level. One thing you should realize is that this is a book without a lot of "fluff", no color drawings, etc., but still better than the majority of newer discussions of history. I didn't find it to be either pro-Christianity or anti-Christianity.

Rating:
Summary: "Child's History" Biased and Eurocentric
Review: This book is used by the Calvert School, a day-school and homsechooling curriculum company based in Maryland. It is because the Calvert curriculum is superior in every other subject (math, science, literature) that the history book sticks out like a sore thumb.

"A Child's History of the World" is as bad (or perhaps worse) than the "history" my daughter endured from Calvert in 3rd grade. Here is an example from page 5: "...before this, there was a time when there was NO WORLD AT ALL! No world at all! Only the stars, and God, who made the stars."

You've got to be kidding me. If you're trying to market your Calvert Homsechooling program as non-religious (which they do), you're going to want to take the references to God out of the history book and put it in a religion book where it belongs. Also, they might want to think about removing the cross next to Christ's notation from the timeline on page xxi. It's a bit Christo-centric, especially since I don't see any other world religious figures on the timeline with their religious symbol next to their names (i.e. Mohammad, Siddhartha Gautama, etc.)

My other strong objection is the Euro-centric focus of this book. A child reading this book would think that nothing ever happened in any other part of the world except Europe since the beginning of time. I noticed this bias in last year's "history" as well. Where are the underground terra cotta armies of the Shang dynasty? Where is the contribution of Arabic mathematicians of the concept of zero? Where is the discussion of Africa-the birthplace of our most ancient ancestors?

This book should be retitled "A Child's History of European Civilizations and Christianity."