Customer Reviews

The Kingfisher Illustrated History of the World: 40,000 B.C. to Present Day

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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.

This is a wonderful book, and I am so disgusted with Kingfisher for letting it go out-of-print, and for replacing it with the much lesser "red book." We homeschool and find this book invaluable! We learned of this book by reading a book I highly recommend: "The Well-Trained Mind, A Guide to a Classical Education at Home" by Wise. We feel badly for all of the parents still searching for this book. Kingfisher told me that they had about 200 in their warehouse, sold me two of them, and told me that other homeschooling parents could contact them to buy copies. Now that source suddenly dried up, and I wonder why. I have stopped buying all Kingfisher books until they reprint this one, and close out the 'red book.'

This is *the* best history book to have for all your child's years from first grade through high school. He's not going to grow out of this book. A specific event or narrow time period is presented on each two-page spread in the book along with many, many helpful colorful drawings. Along each left and right side edge all through the book, however, is an extremely helpful world-wide timeline about everything else going on during the time of these two pages.

This is a very informative and riveting "children's" history book. We try and keep it by our reading chair so that with every book we read, the kids and I can find the same time period in this history book. I say "try" to keep it by our reading chair because my kids are always flopping down on the family room floor with it or taking it to the kitchen table to read through it on their own time. It's really that good of a book. It's out of print for now, but make sure to find a used copy so you can have this gem for your kids.

I purchased the Kingfisher Illustrated History of the World for our home school program this year. It is a wonderful reference book, and we use it not only for school subjects, but also in everyday conversations, when something comes up about history that we're not sure of. We run to the shelf to see what the IHW has to say. I decided to look for this older edition as opposed to purchasing the newer edition (Kingfisher History Encyclopedia) after reading reviews and noticing the differences between the two. As an additional note for those who teach from a biblical worldview, this volume does not support a Creation/Flood model, but includes the first chapter as being 40,000-500 B.C., The Ancient World. This does not, in my opinion, necessitate throwing out the rest of the book, but maybe opens up a discussion with older students of differing opinions of early history that arise without knowledge of the truth of God's Word. I appreciate the broad global scope of the historical events included in the book, since I find most American history texts very Western-centric. Definitely a worthwhile investment in any household!

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