The Kingfisher History Encyclopedia

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: Beware -- this is not the update to the highly regarded Kingfisher Illustrated History. Instead, it reformats the previous work, departing from the orderly 'accent of western civilization' theme, de-emhasizing Greek and Roman history in favour of lesser known, minor world cultures and in general, adds aggresive PC editing. Using this book as a homeschool reference will result in you needing to spend time explaining the PC biases to your children, and ultimately, needing to purchase an additional reference book.

Rating:
Summary: illustrated history of the world
Review: excellent compilation of histoial facts in a very easy to read form. Includes a wealth of information with many historical facts which are very intersesting

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful, I recomend to all!
Review: I absolutly love this book. My friend is home schooled and let me use it a few times and I learned a ton of stuff about places and people I had never even heard about before. I definatly suggest it to all schools and parents of children who are home schooled. I just can't stop gushing about this book to people. Not only will parents love it, but the kids will love it to. It has pictures, time lines, and tons and tons of information. I love this book it is so great. If you ask me I say Buy it! I give it an AAAAAAAAA+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Rating:
Summary: An eye-catching disappointment
Review: I have recently begun homeschooling my 6th grader, and am using The Well Trained Mind as a curriculum guide. This book was listed as a must-have for a classical education, which is based heavily in literature and history. I must say that when we received the Kingfisher History Encyclopedia, it looked very impressive. It is a hefty volume, with colorful pages and a timeline which runs across the top of the pages. However, after only a few weeks of use, my daughter has come to dread the sight of this book whenever it is time for history lessons. It is very dry reading. The one to two-page spreads for each topic/culture/era have so little valuable content, that there is little opportunity for the spark of interest to be ignited. They have so condensed the information, that it is mostly a list of dates, names, etc. And there are boxes every couple of pages listing the same dates over again. The text is written chronologically, so each time you turn the page a different culture is discussed, and what they were doing during that time period. This concept sounds better on paper than in practical use. While the time periods overlap somewhat, it does tend to jump around a quite bit. The continuity of what should be exciting and intriguing becomes very choppy and disjointed and as a result frustrating and boring. What might be interesting stuff becomes distracting and in some cases irritating when it interrupts another story. For example, the rise and fall of Rome, while severely abridged, may have still interested my child, if it had not been broken up by seven other topics. Huge chunks of time (several centuries)are condensed into a paragraph, or even a sentence or two. Other chunks go unmentioned. For example, the Qin Dynasty in China lasted less than 20 years, and got the same attention as the Celts, who were around for 500 years. The first 400 years of Christianity are covered in the same amount of space. So I am seeing my daughter becoming confused about the significance of these subjects, and not really grasping the "chronological order", despite adding new information daily to the 8-foot timeline we keep on the wall. Also,I am constantly amazed at what the makers of this book did not see as important enough for further discussion. For example, in our studies so far, The Great Wall of China has been depicted in a 1/4 page illustration, but only the date it was begun and a sentence or two on why it was built is listed. Julius Caesar is mentioned briefly, and simply that he was assasinated(!?), and I have yet to find any mention of Cleopatra. Overall, this book might be a good addition to your library just to have around for kids to leaf through, or as a springboard for other reading. It does mention cultures I never learned about in school (i.e.,the Guptas )but is not very useful as a reference tool, as there really is not any in-depth information on very many things. In it's effort to cover all bases in a single volume, Kingfisher fails to teach children what history really is -- a really great story.

Rating:
Summary: Complete History foundation
Review: I read this history encyclopedia from beginning to the end; took 2 weeks, an hour a day, in preparation for homeschooling my son. It's about 5th grade level, good descriptions, excellent pictures, covers every corner of the globe. It's a big, thick book and worth the money. I plan on having my son read 2 pages a day and finish it in a year. I can then supplement any information he wishes to know more. Doesn't cover any event in deep detail, but gives excellent overall impression of the history of the whole world. Even I learned a lot!

Highly recommended in addition to other more in depth history studies.

Rating:
Summary: An OK history book at best
Review: I, like a few others who submitted reviews, am a homeschooler, and my mother bought this book to compliment our history curriculi. I was excited over it at first, but was a little disappointed in it. It has helpful illustrations and all, but it has quite a few historical errors. In the introduction states that "The first REAL historian was Herodotus" (emphasis mine). That is a very bad start for an alleged history book. Almost all nations have complete, and most often very accurated histories of their own. These histories are often written off as "myths", as if people living today in 2000 AD know the history of the Celts, Romans, Trojans, Hebrews, Greeks, Chinese and Saxons better than the members of the said people groups who lived through their own history over 3000 years ago!! The amazing thing is that a great majority of these peoples' histories align very nicely with each others', and all of them agree with the Hebrew record recorded on the Bible. This book starts with history beginning at 40,000 B.C., though the history of the Hebrews, Celts, Saxons, Britons, Greeks and Romans all have their creation dates set at about 4000-5000 BC. This book says in the introduction, "Kathleen Kenyon, digging at the site of Jericho in 1952, found that its walls were destroyed, in biblical times, but by fire-not by the sound of trumpets!" That, I must say is a totally anti-religeous biased, and archeologically unfounded claim. On the contrary, Jericho's walls have been found to have been destroyed, and the walls collapsed outward-something that never happens. In Joshua 6:20 it says ;"the walls fell down flat" as opposed to inward, as it would have if they were besieging it with regular siege machines. As to the book's claim that the wall's were burned by fire, when was the last time the authors saw stone burn? Even if the walls had some remnant of ash on them, we read in Joshua, "they took the city". Back in those days they would burn cities. The statement in the book was a cowardly, unbacked weak stab at religion. As to the part about the cave dwellers, the Bible explicitly says that people lived in caves in Job 30:3-8; "For want and famine they were solitary; fleeing into the wilderness in former time desolate and waste, who cut up mallows by the bushes, and juniper roots for their meat.....To dwell in the cliffs of the valleys, in the caves of the earth....They were children of fools, yea, children of base men:they were viler than the earth." This passage of the Bible is talking about a time period around 2,500 BC., not 40,000. The same book talks possibly of the Ice Age, which this book says was at its peak in 16,000 BC; "Out of Who's womb came the ice.. the waters are hid as a stone, and the face of the deep is frozen." Job 38:29-30. This is a perfect illustration of the ice age. Where it talks about the ice coming out of the womb, it gives the picture of a woman giving birth to a glacier, a glacier slowly moving across land, just like scientists say they did, but at a much different time period. Another interesting ancient observation of the ice age was made by early Celtic chroniclers. It said that early Celtic colonists (ones that were descended from the Scythians, note the similarity in the names Scythian and Scot)saw a "tower of ice aproaching the shore. This happens rarely if ever on the Irish coast, and was caused by the Ice Age. It also talks about lakes and rivers breaking out in a certain year. This doesn't just happen, and it was caused by the ice age. Enough of the complaints. It is all right from about 1500 BC to the present. Its color illustrations make it much more interesting to read.

Rating:
Summary: Very disappointed
Review: I, too, bought this book based on recommendations for the original that is now out of print. I found many typos, especially in the last 50 pages of the book. It's as though the publisher didn't even use a spell check! I also found several contradictions in their own facts, dates that were confused etc.
I liked the layout and I believe there are several subjects that are addressed well, but I would suggest that any homeschooling parent read ahead in order to omit the discrepancies found.

Rating:
Summary: Start your history studies here
Review: Learning Family Book Review

If you could only have one history book in your home library, this should be it. Written like an encyclopedia of historical events, the Illustrated History is an incredibly easy to access work, covering almost any historical even you could imagine. The illustrations and photos are excellent. The text is brief, but enough to get a basic understanding. I've begun using this one as a first source for history subjects, to get myself oriented, then continue into more specialised books as needed. The chronolgy is listed in the outside column of the pages, which makes thumbing through it quite easy. Though it isn't a history course in one volume, all of the more major events in history have several pages devoted to them covering archaeological data, social background, art and more. An outstanding book.

Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Resource
Review: The Kingfisher History Encyclopedia appears to be the updated version of the Kingfisher Illustrated History of the World, which received high accolades from Amazon reviewers and others. I've compared the two books. This "replacement" book is better laid out and has better graphics than its predecessor.

The colorful text highlights periods in history from 40,000 B.C. to the present. It is divided chronologically into segments:"The Ancient World" 40,000 BC to 500 BC, and The Classical World, 499 BC - AD 500, Early Middle Ages, 501- 1100, Trade and Empire1601-1707 , Revolution and Independence 1708- 1835, etc.

I like that it covers all regions of the world, including African history, and Indian, Asian, South American, Judea, etc, rather than the typical European history we're all used to. The information is broad in each section and includes wars, empires and dynasties, architecture, culture and arts, science and technology, maps, small biographies of important people in those times. I like that the book is chronological and also broad based in its approach. Each reference takes a full page or full two pages, with easy to find headings at the top of the page. There is a time line across the heading of each page so you know where you are in history. There's a nice "ready reference" in the back with quick notations of rulers and popes and the time period they ruled. I highly recommend this book for middle school years and adults who want a cursory but thought-provoking look at history. This book makes you want to delve more deeply into the different time periods. It's a good starting place for beginning your understanding of ancient history and getting a sense of time and place with regard to history. I homeschool and this is a great resource.

Rating:
Summary: OK
Review: This book is OK but then again I'm only twelve.
I would probebly give it 4 if I was an adult. I don't like History very much, but this is one exeption. I use it at school
and read it just for fun. It really is a great book. But remember, I hate history.