As Editorial Director at Usborne, Jane oversees books about absolutely everything. She grew up in Moscow, Singapore, and in a forest in Sussex, building treehouses and pretending to be one of the Famous Five. Before university she was a social worker in Botswana and camped under the stars in the Kalahari Desert.
Although I initially assumed this encyclopedia was intended primarily for a younger audience [read: primary school level :)], I eventually found it to be an immensely enjoyable read. For an uninitiated reader, this encyclopedia represents an optimal first step - one from which it would be easy to dive deep into any particular area of interest.
Spanning almost three millennia (from ~3000 BC up until 30 BC), the book presents key events in the history of Greece, breaking them into bite sized paragraphs. As someone not too familiar with Greek history, this format was really useful to me, enabling me to mentally mark off important milestones on the timeline of Greece. The fact that it concludes with a summary timeline only made me happier, especially since it provided perspective to Greek history by occasionally mapping events occurring at the same time in other places in the world.
Kudos to the authors who have managed to compactly pack in a vast treasure trove of information into a limited number of pages. Special mention for the designers of this encyclopedia for imbuing it with vivid and stunning illustrations (while remaining relevant to the content).
I came across this while at the library. With my son, in the kid's section! A kid's book, but got a lot of enjoyed out of it! 😂 Lots of interesting info and learned a bit. 👍
This book is very picture heavy but light on prose, which was quite disjointed. My kids didn't like it at all when we tried using it for our homeschool history studies.