Customer Reviews

Sterling Point Books: Alexander the Great

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This is a wonderful biography of Alexander the Great for children. It is clear, easy to read and facinating from page 1 right up to the end of the book. It covers the story of the great King of Macedonia from his babyhood right up to his death. Alexander was powerful and successful for 12 years but pressed on with little rhyme or reason at the end. Things just started to fall apart as easily as they had built up. The book also discusses the different ethnic groups and empires at the time. The author provide the reader with a full picture of who the Macedonian and Greeks were as well as the who the people they conquered were. Highly recommened and many young adults will enjoy it.

I picked up this book hoping to get a great view of Alexander's short life, and intimate details about the famous battles he struggled through. However, this double-spaced book took me a bit over 2 hours to finish while reading at a leisurely pace. It was short, sweet and lacked a lot of information. It's main selling point was that it was an interesting read if not illustrated by the point that I never put it down, but that was about it. It could have been a list of "50 interesting facts about Alexander the Great" and was simply stretched into a 140 page book. That is to say, there was less than one thing to learn on each page. The author (other than his grammatical errors) was clearly skilled when it came to writing, but this was not a serious attempt to capture the life of Alexander.

I'd recommend this book to high school students or adults trying to get a very basic overview of Alexander the Great. This is not to be taken as university-level reading material.