efstan

1922 Newbery Medal Winner Okay... mmmm... no, can't do it. I'm not going to finish this one. A lot of reviewers have already aired legitimate criticisms of this first of the Newbery-winning children's books. I got past the Indo-Europeans, Romans, Greeks, etc., and some of the sections in those were pretty interesting as a jumping-off point to learning more about history. It's definitely about Western civilization, though, and doesn't represent "mankind" as a whole in any sense. In one of the illustrative maps, Europe and the Mediterranean are carved up into various peoples and empires, whereas Africa is all one place labeled "Negroes." Ouch. There is one chapter "Concerning Buddha and Confucius," but China as an ancient civilization advanced for its time is ignored. Laughably, the beginning paragraph in the chapter referenced above says "As this is a story of mankind and not an exclusive history of the people of Europe and our western hemisphere, you ought to know something of two men whose teaching and whose example continue to influence the actions and the thoughts of the majority of our fellow-travelers on this earth" (241). I'll just let that one sit there. Two pages later is a map of "The Three Great Religions" that shows Europe as being full of "Christians," North Africa and the Middle East full of "Mohammedans," India and China both full of "Buddhists," and everything north of China is labeled "Heathens." To be fair, despite the author being a person of his time who focuses on world history from a European perspective and pretends that he's writing a world history, he doesn't really seem to advocate violence against other people. He includes a lot of Christian and Jewish beliefs presented as factual history, but he also discusses evolution and early man. In the chapter on "Colonial Expansion and War," he goes on a tangent for a few pages about how the entire history was written with his personal bias about what was important. So, he's not without self-reflection. That said, as a librarian I can't really call this a history book. It's more like a creative memoir of Western civilization by a specific man at a specific time with all of the implicit biases and assumptions that entails. Parts of it appear to be made up wholesale, like the Roman letters about Jesus of Nazareth, and it has zero source citations. So, I can't recommend it as a history book, and I can't recommend it for modern kids because it's kind of sleep-inducing and not very appropriate in the way it refers to "savages," "heathens," etc. The most I can say to its credit is that some of it is well-written and the author was aware of some of its flaws.

2022-11-14 18:02