Samurai

by Louie Stowell, Jason Engle (Illustrator)

Describes the responsibilities, skills, weapons, and training of samurai.

61 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2007

About the author

Louie Stowell started her career writing carefully researched books about space, ancient Egypt, politics, and science, but eventually she lapsed into just making stuff up. She likes writing about dragons, wizards, vampires, fairies, monsters, and parallel worlds. Louie Stowell currently works as the publisher of Ladybird Books and lives in London with her wife, Karen; her dog, Buffy; and a creepy puppet that is probably cursed.

Reviews

[mina · Rating 3 out of 5]

The illustrations are amazing. It's a great start to learning about Japan and its history. It definitely piqued my curiosity.

[Rick Silva · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was the book that the Kiddo (my son, age 9) picked out from his school's book fair this year. His main interest in samurai up to this point has been with the Power Rangers Samurai TV series, but this book did a nice job of getting him interested in the real samurai of Japanese history.

The book features gorgeous full-color illustrations by Jason Engle on every page, and it does a nice job of keeping several centuries of history interesting and exciting. It pulls no punches as far as some of the more grim aspects of that history go. There is a lot of discussion of violent death in this book.

It veers into the more mythological side of the stories in a few places, but there is plenty of real history contained within its pages.

For young readers with an interest in Japan, this book is a good starting point.

[Ken · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very nice book but it might be a little too graphic for younger readers.

[Chanika Jayawardana]

This book tells about the old japanese samurai. It is a good thing to know about a historical war.