Customer Reviews

Lewis and Clark: Explorers of the American West

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

 

 

I highly recommend this book as one of the better children's books about the Lewis and Clark Expedition--solely for its wonderfully beautiful and active pictures.

I acknowledge and appreciate the astute scholar in another review who corrected the author about an error (quite important, actually), but even so, Kroll's choice of story and great pictures outweigh the regrettable error. The story for children comes across very well regardless. The target audience children won't know the difference and it does not detract from the overall story. They will still gain a very good understanding about the mission and hardships Lewis and Clark and their army detachment overcame. Wonderful book.

In adapting and condensing a sprawling real-life adventure for a juvenile audience, this book unfortunately seems to take much of the excitement out of the story. One wonders if the text and illustrations might actually work okay by themselves -- just not in the same book together.

The illustrations appear to be oil paintings, using a fairly consistent (monotonous) range of muted earth tones. Most are done in square format and printed "full bleed," one per page (no margins). As a result, most times that you look at two facing pages, you are fooled into thinking that you're looking at two parts of a single wide illustration. They just blend into each other, and generally don't seem to capture much drama.

If the paintings had more visual variety, or clung more closely to the text, that might not happen. But as it is, the two elements do not seem to hang together. The text is detailed enough to be interesting to an older (3rd grade or higher) student, but the simplistic picture-book approach might make it less appealing to such kids. Meanwhile, all those details will be overwhelming (or boring) to a younger reader.

Another review here mentions some concerns about factual accuracy, regarding one very small part of the expedition's long itinerary. Frankly, I would not get so excited over that, considering the audience. I don't think any children will be grabbing this volume and running off to use it as a guidebook in retracing the steps of Lewis and Clark.

Of more concern is whether such details (like specific choices of routes, or names of valleys and rivers and whatnot) have any place at all, in a book with such a simplistic and distracting visual approach. Or, instead, whether the pictures ought to be smaller and more numerous, so that they illustrate all the many episodes of this adventure more faithfully.

We got this as part of Amazon's 3-for-4 promotion, in hopes of getting a fact-based story, at the elementary school level, at a bargain price. Well, I think one might be better off spending more money and choosing from one of the zillions of other books on this topic. I haven't looked yet, but I can't help thinking that somebody, somewhere must have done this better.

The sheer beauty of these illustrations will knock your socks off. It is hard to capture the bravery, excitement, and fear of the expedition members in so short a book; Steven Kroll does a fine job. The pictures alone make this a book worth having -- large, memorable illustrations to capture the imagination of your little adventurer.

This book is going hand in hand with my Lewis and Clark Unit. I chose it because of the excellent illustrations and how it condenses the whole of the expedition.

For those of us living along the Lewis and Clark trail in Montana and using this book with school children who study Lewis and Clark, we found an obvious error of historical fact. Lewis and Clark never traveled into the Flathead Valley as Kroll states on page 23. Instead, the explorers crossed over Lost Trail Pass into our lovely Bitterroot Valley and traveled north to make camp at Traveler's Rest, on the edge of present day Lolo, MT. The old Lolo trail (now US highway 12) leaves the Bitterroot Valley crossing the Bitterroot Mountains to the west. Could it be Kroll became confused because the Native Americans Lewis and Clark met in the Bitterroot were the Salish Flathead tribe?