I Am Rosa Parks

I am Rosa Parks

By Brad Meltzer

Illustrated by Christopher Eliopoulos

A whitewashed (ahem) picture book biography of the famed Civil Rights icon. Parson Weems would be proud.

Now that we have Phillip Hoose’s Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice out in the world I feel it is incumbent on anyone treading toward teaching kids about the Civil Rights do so with a more open understanding of history.

Rosa Parks was chosen as the symbol for a bus boycott, and sometimes what you need is a symbol to make history, but you need a balanced and more nuanced hand to tell history, especially to kids.

Parson Weems is responsible for the story of George Washington and the cherry tree, a myth so prevalent that kids know it almost without being taught. For Weems, writing over 100 years ago, the idea of mythologizing American heroes was a conscious effort meant to galvanize a national pride. But we’re smarter than that now, right?

Apparently not.

Meltzer – better know to adults as a writer of adult thrillers – spends a great deal of the this book painting Rosa Parks as a child who always stood up for herself, leading to her taking a stand on that famous bus seat. This is well and good, but then we jump ahead to the Civil Rights and her meeting MLK and a happy little ending about how important it all was that she stood up for herself.

But she wasn't the first.

Don’t kids deserve to also know about the young Claudette Colvin who preceded Rosa Parks by a full 9 months, the first person to actually be arrested for protesting the segregation of public busses? Certainly there are ways to skip the messier parts of Colvin’s story, or to include them within context, but to ignore that part of history altogether? Well, that's just inconvenient toward the narrative.

This book is part of a series “Ordinary People Change the World” which is a great idea in theory, but the other people in this series include Lincoln, and Amelia Earhart, neither of whom were really that ordinary when you think about it. I’m not trying to take anything away from Rosa Parks or from kids knowing who she was historically, but when it comes to teaching kids history there is a responsibility to get it right, to tell it right.

Some source material at the end of a biography would be nice as well. Unless, you know, it’s all just a storybook and not a history at all.

And maybe, just maybe, it could be written by someone who wasn’t white.

Worlds Afire

by Paul B. Janeczko  
Candlewick 2004  

A circus tent. A catastrophic fire. The voices of those who were there, victim and witness, their stories in verse.  

On the afternoon of July 6, 1944 a fire broke out at the Ringling Brother's Circus while in performance in Hartford, Connecticut. The tent canvas had been waterproofed with paraffin and gasoline, a combination that turned the entire circus effectively into "one huge candle / just waiting for a light." No one knows how it began but once the tent caught fire it was only a matter of moments before it was engulfed in flame. 500 were injured and 167 people died, and Janeczko has chosen to let the voices of the people involved tell the story from their own perspective.  

Janeczko leaves it up to the reader to pick up the clues within each poem to guess who survived. The poems are separated by three parts, or acts if you will. Part 1 gives us what people were thinking and doing just before the circus. Some were excited kids, some were circus performers getting everything ready, and piece by piece, line by line, we get little details that anticipate the disaster to come. Part 2 deals with the disaster itself. What it was like to be dealing with large cats when the fire broke out and people were running everywhere. What it looked like from under the bleachers by a kid who was collecting the change that fell out of people's pockets, how he was able to cut a hole in the side of the tent with a pocket knife and escape. Part 3 covers the sober aftermath as survivors and townspeople come to grips with the horror. A soldier anxious for active duty overseas finds working morgue detail more gruesome than the war he is about to head into.  

With an economy of image and detail Janeczko delivers a portrait as alluring and ephemeral as a flickering flame.  There's a very Spoon River Anthology feel to the book, with its ghostly echoes of people from the past reliving a single day – a single, horrific day – in the gentle breeze of a summer day that changed, defined, or took their lives.

Lost States

Lost States:
True Stories of Texlahoma, Transylvania, and Other States That Never Made It
by Michael J. Trinklein
Quirk Books 2010


What if the United States had accepted every proposal to form a new state? One really messed up flag, that's for sure!  

Growing up in Southern California it is hard not to notice that there is a simmering animosity with neighbors to the north. It isn't so much that Sacramento, the state's northern nowheresville capitol, is out of touch with the urban hipness of Los Angeles, Hollywood, and the wealthy enclaves of Santa Barbara and San Diego counties. Nor was it the hippie-centric enclaves of Santa Cruz and San Francisco who felt that the south was nothing more than water-stealing conservatives. It was the fact that California was, and is, a "destination state" that draws immigrants from all over the country, so much so that fewer than one in seven Californians is a native. Basically, the state is full of people up and down the coast who'll never agree with one another; dividing the state into factions seems like a good idea only until it comes time to discuss how to do it, at which point things fall apart.

Every state in the United States, apparently, has some version of this story. Reading Lost States: True Stories of Texlahoma, Transylvania, and Other States That Never Made It is a fun little romp through the growing pains of a young nation and the people who would mold it to their personal agendas. Some of these lost states were merely boundary squabbles latter settled by politicians, others were publicity stunts designed to attract tourists or business, and still more have been proposed as a matter of political or economic practicality like the annexation of various islands for some strategic advantage. Each of the Lost States receives a brief history of its proposal and why it failed as well as a map outlining (or in most cases approximating) it's location in relation to what state is currently in its place. Many of these proposed states are clearly the results of the early land grabs and settlements of the 19th century. The really odd and interesting stories are the ones that reveal hidden, sometimes dark, histories. American Imperialism is alive and well in the proposal for adding the island nation of Saipan to the nation (or incorporating it into Guam and making an honest state of them both). The only problem is that Saipan – a slave-trading sweatshop nation that produces a huge amount of name-brand clothing with "Made in the USA" legally attached to it – would never be allowed to told what to do by a strong democracy like Guam, much less agree to US labor laws under which it would be bound.

Odder still is the former Soviet republic of Albania actively seeking to become the fifty-first state. So eager in fact that English is an official language and when the US seeks allies for foreign intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan, Albania is first to step up. While there might be some political advantage gained by having a state wedged into the Adriatic coast between Greece and Montenegro, chances are better that Russia and the European Union might see the move as an opening salvo toward world domination. As Lost States suggests, Albania courting statehood is akin to "talking about marriage on the first date. Run, America, run!"

There's a lot to be learned in this book beyond the trivial. Apparently when Texas was admitted to the Union it was allowed the provision to divide itself up into as many as four states without having to seek Congressional approval. As the book points out, this means that the area of Texas could have as many as eight senators in Washington instead of two. It seems like Governor Rick Perry should have focused his attentions on dividing his state rather than promoting succession a while back. It amazes me that provision is still on the books.


Trinklein's maps are individual and well-created for the most part. Sometimes modifying older maps, creating new maps as necessary, for anyone who loves looking at or studying maps its fun to imagine how different things would be if, say, we talked vacationing in New Sweden instead of Maryland, or went to the Grand Canyon in New Mexico, or if, somehow, No Man's Land simply remained the unclaimed panhandle of Oklahoma.

(This review is cross-posted at Guys Lit Wire today, a great resource for books of interest to teen boys and their minders.)

1001 People/Events That Made America

I'm a particular fan of American history in that I'm particular about the parts I like. It isn't an ideological divide as much as it is that there are certain periods that appeal to me for some reason. I'm fond of the colonialists and the American Revolution, but for the stories of the smaller moments and not the battles. I also have a soft spot for the socialist movement of the 1930's and anything that sheds light on the deceptive prosperity of post-war American in the 1950's and 60's. In a lot of cases, the history I'm attracted to are the stories of people who left a lasting impression.

I'll be frank: what originally drew me to these books by Alan Axelrod -- 1001 People Who Made America and 1001 Events That Made America -- was the subtitle on 1001 Events -- "A Patriot's Handbook." Indeed! 1001 events to serve as a handbook for patriots? Now I'm curious.

1001 Events proved to be exactly the book I expected, a collection of short paragraphs that chronicle the history of the country from the original Asian migration 40,000 years ago to Hurricane Katrina. Though presented chronologically, Axelrod suggests (and I agree) that the book should be perused for areas of preference. Using the index in the back one could look up a topic of interest -- like Manifest Destiny -- and read a quick summary to sate one's curiosity before glancing at the entries to either side for a little historical context. In this instance there is a paragraph immediately preceding about the New York Knickerbocker Baseball Club formalizing the rules for baseball, disputed by the suggestion that the game had been invented in Philadelphia 12 years earlier. The entry following manifest Destiny informs us that Texas was admitted into the Union, "vitually ensuring a war with Mexico." Why is that? Well, you'll have to read back a few pages to find out what's been going on in that part of the country.

That, for me, is the joy of this sort of collection, being able to jump around at will. The actual content is fairly safe -- no mention of the Chinese perhaps discovering America, but also no mention of when the Russians first occupied Alaska -- and the brevity of the information given ensures that the curious will need to seek detailed information elsewhere. I was surprised to see that a certain Volney Palmer of Philadelphia becomes the first ad agent and coins the term "advertising agency" in 1841. Not very long after that we get our first "modern" presidential campaigns full of slogans, songs, and negative attack ads. God Bless America!

Which leads me to Axelrod's other book, which in some ways s more satisfying. It would seem a daunting task to believe that the number of people it took to "make" American can be reduced to 1001, but this alphabetical listing of noted Americans does a fine job.

In addition to the usual suspects -- the presidents, the rich and famous -- are the names of those readers might know but never considered the person behind the name. The Armour behind the meat packing business, the Colt behind the gun, the Henry McCarty who was Billy the Kid. I'm pleased to see a fair number of players in the Watergate saga are here: Woodward and Bernstein, of course, but Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Hunt, Dean, and Sam Ervin all make an appearance. The last time I saw a high school history textbook the Watergate scandal was given cursory coverage, and certainly less than what there is here. Usually we get that Nixon was involved in a break-in and cover-up and that's about it. These entries won't fill in all the 18-minute gaps but it's a start.

Artists, musicians and writers are also represented (though not as well represented as I'd like) as are some whose distinction in "making" this country can be seen as dubious. The Reverend Jim Jones and the cuddly Charles Manson are here, but so is Monica Lewinsky. That these people had an effect on events in our nation cannot be ignored, but to say their actions "made" this country what it is strikes me as a bit much. This is where the limitation of 1001 entries is perhaps the book's weakness. I find myself wishing there were more artists mentioned, more women... but to the exclusion of whom?

I suppose questions like that cannot be helped. Recently I was asked to name my top three films of all times and found myself stumbling. For every title I could come up with there were easily three more that sprang to mind, and suddenly I was trying to find some way to winnow down a couple dozen into just three. I suspect it's no less difficult narrowing a list of noted Americans down to 1001 as well.

I found little in 1001 Events to support the claim toward being a patriot's handbook -- unless the implication is that it contains all the information one might need to know to pass a citizenship exam -- and noticed that in the paperback edition National Geographic has left the subtitle off the cover. It's easy to tout patriotism and another to define it. Leave the fuzzy work to politicians and give me raw bits of history to gnaw on instead.


(This post also appears over at Guys Lit Wire. Really, you haven't checked it out yet? You really should.)

Duel! Burr and Hamilton's Deadly War of Words

by Dean Brindell Fradin
illustrated by Larry Day
Walker Books 2008

It's a reflection of my quality education that I graduated without knowing the story of the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton. Or it's proof of what a horrible student I used to be. But perhaps if I'd had this nifty little picture book when I was younger it would have stuck with me while I was attempting to handle the grind of AP US History at the same time my family was falling apart.

In a few quick pages Fradin shows us the troubled childhoods of these two men, how they suffered similarly as boys, and grew to be men with something to prove. Throughout their adult lives their paths cross and intertwine, Hamilton the insecure with a chip on his shoulder for being foreign born, Burr the arrogant with anger management issues. It quickly becomes apparent that these two men were as star-crossed as any, rivals fated to shoot it out on the shores of the Hudson river one cold morning. To summarize any more would be to retell the book, and Fradin does such a great job swiftly hitting the highlights in this historic rivalry that it makes you want to reach out and shake either Hamilton and Burr and point out "Dudes! You're on the same side! Quit fighting!"

Day's watercolors have some best dramatic compositions I've seen for a non-fiction book in a stretch. The cover image looks like a frame borrowed from a spaghetti western, and the illustrations throughout are no less striking for their choice of angles and moments.

As always with picture books like this I'm a little uncertain about the audience. Readers old enough to be interested in the details of history like this would prefer, to my mind, something other than a picture book.

Sons of Liberty

by Marshall Poe
illustrated by Leland Purvis
Aladdin Turning Points series 2008

This first title in a new series of graphic novels that focuses on "turning points" in history follows the members of a fictitious Boston family as they endure British rule from 1768 through the signing of the Declaration of Independence. That's the nuts and bolts and as things go the book is about as dry as that description.

This is the down side of the "trend" in graphic novels. "Let's take the most exciting moments in history and show them in a comic book format and that'll make them less dull." Uh, no it doesn't. The idea of having fictitious events "blended" with factual moments sounds like it could be dynamic, but if the interest isn't there going in you have to create that interest.

We start with Nathaniel Smithfield at age ten excited by the rousing words of the patriots, much to his loyalist father's dismay. Okay, so you want to set up the tension between generations, and you want to play with history... you still have to provide both the history and the emotional tug. You can't just assume the reader will know what's going on in Boston in 1768 and you can't portray a ten year old boy like a modern day boy in colonial clothing.

In a visual level this is sort of a mess as well. I missed the initial transition between the "chapters" in Nathaniel's life, from ten year old play-soldier to teenage apprentice to engraver Paul Revere (yawn). It wasn't readily apparent that Nathaniel had aged, he just looked inconsistently drawn. This was followed by a clumsy bit of exposition meant to show how Nathaniel had grown in his beliefs and feed a bit of history at the same time. And is that his dad he's talking to? That wasn't clear either, and on the whole being able to recognize characters (no matter how thinly fleshed out) is crucial in sequential storytelling, particularly if you're going to follow a character as they age.

If you have even the most passing knowledge of American history (uh, we got our independence is all you need to know here) then it's obvious from page one how this ends. The boy will grow, and with him his sympathies toward the the colonialist cause, and in the end dad will be converted by reason to liberty. Yea, liberty. What would rock, what would be new and fresh and make history come to life are all the details from the other side. Let's see it through the blind eyes of the loyalists -- because we know how it turns out in the end, let us see the reaction to those on the losing side, how they lived it and rationalized it If history is written by the winners let the winners be gracious enough to show both sides.

Poe, a professor of history, doesn't give us anything that we haven't already seen before in Forbes' Johnny Tremain, or even Lawson's Ben and Me for that matter. With an eager audience like the one currently built into graphic novels aimed at kids why not shoot for the moon? Instead of a passive-aggressive boy who throws the first rock in a riot, then wonders "did I just do that?" lets see something that might hit a little closer to home: show us how the occupying forces came to overstay their welcome, and how liberty was forged as a result of their oppression, really show it. Show the oppression and the struggle and not merely a couple of brash statements illustrated by the slamming of a hand on a table.

It's hard not to constantly see how history echoes, and to be accused of revisionism in the process, but there are some uncomfortable points in Colonial American history that inform who and what we are as a nation today. Why give us a retread of textbook material in comic form when we can deliver so much more to today's young readers?

How Does the Show Go On?

An Introduction to the Theater
by Thomas Schumacher
with Jeff Kurtti
Disney Editions 2007

This one is killing me.

This handsome book provides a fantastic window into the production of a modern Broadway musical with a solid background in theatre production aimed at the middle grade and early teen set. The book starts at the front of the house explaining how the theatre staff keep things running, then goes on stage, back stage, through rehearsals, all the way through opening night explaining how it all comes together. Throughout there's lots of interactive materials to study; a facsimile copy of Playbill; a reproduction of an actual ticket (detailing how to read your seat assignment); there's an envelope containing a section of a script and later on another bit of script with the lighting cues delineated; there's even a quarter-sized facsimile folder containing a director's production sketches with a photos that follow showing how they were executed.

But it's Disney, and being Disney means that no musical theatre on Broadway existed before The Lion King. The author, being the producer of most of Disney's Broadway shows (it says so twice on the cover!), is more than happy to share this knowledge but every photo is Disney. The enclosed Playbill and ticket are from The Lion King, as are the facsimiles of Julie Taymor's production sketches. Sections of script are from Tarzan and much of the behind the scenes includes images from Mary Poppins. While it was nice of them to explain the differences between theatre types -- a thrust stage from a black box from an amphitheatre -- it seems a bit presumptuous to call the book "an introduction to the theater" and conveniently ignore the world outside the sphere of all things Disney.

Granted, a kid who is into musical theatre might have come to it through Disney originally but what if they didn't? Does it matter that Disney basically turned a bit of self-promotion into an introduction to an art form?

This is what tears me. You see, I've got two girls in the house who have this thing for musical theatre. Their school puts on a musical every year (two actually, a 7th and 8th grade production in the fall, a 2nd through 6th grade production in the spring) and they have elected to participate every year. They are also part of an after-school musical theatre group and perform in those shows in the fall and spring. And then there are the movie musicals we watch at home which, fortunately, they continue to enjoy. Their favorite movie musical is Singin' In the Rain. They recently watched My Fair Lady and Little Shop of Horrors. We took them to see Wicked in October. They sing show tunes in the shower. They know there's a world of musicals that isn't Disney and they also know High School Musical (which to me is like a cross between an 80's sitcom and an Afterschool Special with pop songs grafted onto it).

I really think they might like this book but I don't like the narrow focus. I'm not so rabidly anti-Disney that I would refuse it on those grounds alone -- it would look hypocritical considering we own a number of classic Disney cartoon collections -- but the total pro-Disney aspect of the book leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Open question for the people at Disney Editions, and their publishing family: Are you so threatened by the entire history of Broadway that you felt the need to exclude all mention of it from your book? Are you so insecure about your right to be on The Great White Way that you had to buy the New Amsterdam Theatre in order to assure yourself a home? Or is it, as with Time Square, you simply want to replace what's out there with good old fashioned family values?

Did you have to produce such an attractively biased book?

As an introduction to theatre I guess I would have hoped for more of an historical perspective. I would feel a lot more comfortable introducing this book to kids if I knew they had something just as good -- and less Disney -- to move on to afterward.

America Dreaming

How Youth Changed America in the 60's
Laban Carrick Hill
Little Brown 2007

Finally. Now we're getting somewhere.

In an amazingly clear and concise 175 pages or so the history and influence of the Boomer generation is laid out for a young adult audience. Starting with the post-war population boom and suburban expansion, the book focuses on the various key elements and movements that brought about the most sweeping changes in the way America and Americans defined themselves, for better or worse, and how young adults were at the forefront.

The opening chapter sets the stage as 1950's Americans flooded to the pre-fab development communities of Levittown, as television and rock-and-roll took the cultural stage, as the Cold War began to heat up. Then chapter by chapter another piece to the puzzle is added -- the race for space, the Kennedy Camelot including the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Beatles and psychedelia and free love, the Civil Rights Movement. All tried and true subjects, but what makes this fascinating are the chapters on the Black Power Movement (including the full text of the Black Panther Party's Ten-Point Plan), the Chicano and Native American movements, the radical anti-war protests (not just Kent State but the Weathermen), the feminists and, as the boomers reached the 1970's, the gay rights movement with a bit of coverage on the Stonewall riots. Hill doesn't shy away from messier topics like drugs or abortion rights, covering the material in an even-handed tone that gives readers a chance to draw their own conclusions and make their own connections.

The chapters move in a mostly forward progression but thy also stand alone in examining their subjects. History isn't presented here as a liner parade of facts and dates and places, but as ideas shaped by time and place, growing organically out of what came before without the tidiness or need for perfect order. Chaotic times call for a different narrative. The book flows at it's own pace, to its internal rhythms. Readers might be surprised to learn just how politically and socially radical their parent's and grandparent's once were. If nothing more, the material gives plenty of ammunition for conversations about what things were like "back in the day."

Presentation goes a long way. The book's larger size -- approximately 10 by 12 inches -- allow for large blocks of text to be accompanied by full-page images and sidebars filled with details and tidbits. Archival photos and period ephemera make this a triumph for the designers as well; the book feels fresh without veering into forced hipness, even if the subject matter is a few decades older than its intended audience. It also makes the book half as many pages as if presented as straight text, making it feel more accessible.

My only quibble, and it is minor, is that the book really is more of a portrait of the boomer generation than a pure examination of the 1960's. At the end of the book there is a year-by-year summary of major events that starts in 1946 and ends at 1975, pretty much the formative years of the boomer generation. I doubt that anyone is really ready to present the boomers as a worthy subject of study for middle grade and young adult, but that's essentially what the 60's are about. That aside, this really is a fine introductory study for the third quarter of the 20th century.

Now we need something exactly like this for the final quarter to explain how the gen-x generation brought us to where we are today.

Snakes with Wings and Gold-digging Ants

by Herodotus, aka Cicero
Father of History
Penguin Great Journeys series 2007

While on my recent travels I stumbled onto a couple new series put out by Penguin books, smartly packaged 120 page excerpts from the various titles in their Classics backlist. In the Great Loves series they include ruminations on love from writers as varied as Virgil, Casanova, Freud, Nin and Updike. They've also done a similar series of excerpts from historical epics (Beowulf, The Iliad, &c.) and the Great Journeys series which includes historical records and reportage from the likes of Orwell, Marco Polo and the dude, Herodotus.

This stuff is perfect plane/train reading while traveling, and it was while I was reading it that I realized that these things could be used to help teach history and culture to teens. They're short and designed to send the average reader hunting down the originals in the Penguin catalog. Which, in a classroom environment, means that a student can chase down the things that interest them. If I'd had world history presented to me this way back in the day I'd have probably done better in school. I think this kind of presentation of non-fiction could answer some of the problems I have with textbooks.

I was so fired up by this book and the presentation of these series' that I decided to use this book for my critical essay requirement for grad school. When I was just about done with the spit-and-polish on the essay I went back to the application to double-check on the page count and noticed that they specifically requested the essay make reference to the writing process, the craft of writing, how writing can change the world and cure communicable diseases worldwide.

Okay, I made that last part up, but it was clear I had to write a totally different essay. What follows is the essay I didn't send.

I hated history as a teen. As far as I was concerned history, the factual recounting of what had taken place in the world, was as dead as the trees it was printed on in textbooks. The word itself teases by containing the word “story” but what was offered up was an anemic tale at best, a neutered account of names and places in oversimplified contexts meant to impart a greater meaning.

What I needed - what is needed in general – was to go to the source. Young readers are constantly struggling to understand the world and their place in it and history, presented in an engaging manner, can provide that. By using historical documents and texts that speak of the world in a first-hand way, that show history as a raw tale of events, readers can filter and conceptualize within the context of their own personal truths and understanding.

For those who doubt this sort of thing can be done I only need point to the first book in the new Penguin Great Journeys series entitled Snakes with Wings and Gold-digging Ants, a selection from the writings of Herodotus. In a scant 115 pages we are treated to alleged first-hand accounts of the peoples and histories of the North African region as they existed 400 years B.C. by a man classically known as Cicero, The Father of History. With that little information alone as introduction the book plunges into some of the more extravagant histories ever recounted by an unreliable narrator.

Herodotus admits that he has heard fantastical tales of the people of the region but decides to limit his accounts only to those stories and events that he has witnessed with his own eyes... or second-hand from those he feels are reliable. A fair enough claim for a historian to make, but then he goes on to recount events from which he couldn't have possibly been witness, and worse, claims to see things that we know to be patently untrue. He uses historical accounts from various peoples of the region to pick apart Homer's account of the Iliad and provides an alternate interpretation. He notes, and approves of, the various polygamous tribes he encounters and makes many references of practices adopted by the Greeks that were clearly borrowed from others.

Things get trickier when he claims that no people live beyond the eastern edge of the great deserts of India (essentially all of Asia), or that there are tribes of native Indians whose semen is as black as their skin. To modern ears these claims smack of a blindness reminiscent of sailor's tales that you could sail off the edge of the world (or presidents who insist on the presence of Weapons of Mass Destruction and that invading armies will be received favorably as liberators). It then becomes imperative that readers – and I'm speaking of young readers in particular – come to understand the historian within their times, in context, and to extrapolate from that how this “factual” information can be used to generate false assumptions. The Father of History suddenly looks to be nothing more than the gatherer of regional tales, the paterfamilias in a continuing line of storytellers.

It can be risky to introduce young adults to the idea that first-person history must always be viewed with skepticism as it opens the doors for micro-revisionism and unchecked bias, but as a tool for teaching critical thinking of what makes history meaningful the risk is worth taking.

Whether or not Herodotus's errors were deliberate, they do still hold up as a window into what was popularly believed at the time. His reportage would leave something to be desired by modern standards, but that's exactly the point in the study of history; the truth of the moment changes as it is understood from the standpoint of a later time.

There is a certain shrewd brilliance in this collection, pulling excepts that clearly read like an adventurer's travelogue meant to tantalize. No doubt Penguin would like it if, their appetite whetted by the excerpts, readers went hunting down the larger editions within their back catalog. Where this smörgåsbord-style of study lacks the coherence of a traditional world history textbook its presentation makes up the difference by providing engaging historical documents – first-person accounts at that – with the promise of bringing history to life.