Customer Reviews

How Would You Survive in the Middle Ages?

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Fiona Macdonald is famous for writing beutiful books about the past. She explains in a very friendly, clear and fascinating way how our ancestors lived. Children who dislike history and who think that the past is boring change their mind when they see the magnificintly illustrated books Fiona makes. This book pulls you into the Middle ages and gets you as close to the past as possible without a time-machine. On the first page you see a picture of a medieval town, people are working, there ia a market and there is more than enough to see. On several place throughout the city you find small questions like 'Would you be afraid of these soldiers?'. You see three scary looking soldiers playing a game on a tower. If you would like to know what game they are playing you can go to another page. It works almost as a internetsite with several links. The book is almost ineractive. The Chapters are clear and very beuatifyllt illustrated. The author tells us how life would be for people in the middle ages. You can follow 'a-day-in-the-life-of, you can see battles, castles, cities and farmers. It is a book that you will pick up again and again. Children will love it, it is very handy for making school projects. As always Fiona Macdonald has succeeded in making another brilliant book about the past. Bringing the past closer and educating the young. The Illustrators have done a perfect job, every single picture is a pleasure to look at.

With the rather facile title of the series, I had no great expectations--but WOW! what a wonderful book to counter all the misconceptions about the middle ages that are promulgated even in many adults' books! I adore it. If you only get one book that touches on the social history of the middle ages, this should be it!

I offer a dissenting view of this book. No doubt that the team of Fiona MacDonald and David Salariya is one of the strongest partnerships in children's history books. They are leaders in the field and have published many great books. My problem is with the structure of the book. The Middle Ages is a huge topic and MacDonald does a decent job of presenting the story for young children. But what drove me crazy about this book is that along with the main narrative, each two page chapter also includes numerous smaller illustrations and sub stories. As someone trying to read this book to their child, I had to really squint to be able to read these smaller side bars. I found these side bars to be confusing and a digresion from the main narrative. There are many other books that do a more coherent job of telling this important story. I would recommend any books from the "Inside Story" series or Giovanni Caselli's "The Everyday Life Series". Philip Steele's "The Medieval World" and "Castles" are much better books.

This is so much better than the other general information books available. I had to pay the cost of new for a rather worn and discolored version. It was still worth it. This is a superior approach to making general information about the middle ages interesting to children. The other books now look like a hodge-podge.

This is a fun little book. I use it with my high school students when we study literature from this era.