From Booklist
Most profiles include a photograph or drawing of the biographee; a short description of why he or she is notable; a quote by or about the leader that sums up accomplishments, personality, or historical standing; data including variant forms of name with pronunciation, family (parents, siblings, spouse, and children), and birth and death dates, where available; a brief chronology of events in the leader's life; and sources for further reading. Boldface type is used within the text to cross-reference entries on other persons. Each article is signed, with the affiliation of the contributor provided. Occasionally, brief information about a related person is provided in a sidebar. For example, the entry on Nicholas II has a sidebar on Rasputin. Each volume contains the complete table of contents for the set, but the indexes are not cumulative. Appendixes in each volume include chronologies of political and royal leaders and maps. Some maps are printed with gray backgrounds, which make them difficult to read.
The editors have included collective entries chronicling the lives of people linked by circumstance and/or ideology. Among those groups are Post-Stalin Soviet Leaders (Yuri Andropov, Leonid Brezhnev, and others); Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi (Fannie Lou Hamer, Medgar Evers [spelled Evans in the preface], James Meredith); American Secretaries of State (Cordell Hull, John Foster Dulles, Dean Rusk [spelled Risk in the preface], and others); the Song Sisters (Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Madame Sun Yat-sen, Madam Kong); and Jiang Qing and the Gang of Four.
There are minor lapses in proofreading, as noted above, but they do not detract from the overall high quality of Historic World Leaders. There is minimal overlap between the approximately 180 North Americans covered in volumes 4 and 5 of this set and the more than 2,000 in The Grolier Library of North American Biographies [RBB Je 94]. Historic World Leaders is highly recommended for academic, public, and high-school libraries as yet another source of biographical information.
