Customer Reviews

In Their Own Words: Pocahontas

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I think this is a great resource for teachers who need a good biography on a native american indian who had an impact on our lives. It is an easy reading book with great detail. I recommend this book to anyone interested in learning more about Pocahontas and the Powhatan tribe.

Scholastic's new series, IN THEIR OWN WORDS, is designed to tell you all about famous people's lives and what they accomplished. Most of you have heard of the legend of Pocahontas which claims she was only 12 years old when she saved Captain Smith's life. But did she really save Captain Smith or did he just make that up after she was dead?

Pocahontas, which wasn't her real name, was kidnapped by the English and turned into an Englishwoman. The book contains lots of pictures of her, two of them made during her lifetime, plus pictures of the kinds of dwellings she would have lived in as an Indian princess. You'll learn about the lives of her descendants, too. For example, her son inherited land from his grandfather Powhatan --- land in the thousands of acres --- and turned it into a tobacco plantation. Hundreds and hundreds of descendants of Pocahontas are living today. Even though she only lived to be 21 years old, she played an important part in our nation's history and today there's a statue of her that stands in Jamestown, Virginia.

The IN THEIR OWN WORDS series also gives you tips about how to research historic information. It explains the difference between primary sources and secondary sources when you're studying history. For example, you will see some pictures that people, even young schoolgirls, have painted of Pocahontas over the years. You can decide whether you think they were accurate likenesses, or whether people tried to make her look more beautiful than she really was.

Read this book and find out a lot more facts and interesting history about one of the most famous people in America. Pocahontas may even have been the person most responsible for there being the United States of America.

--- Reviewed by Tamara Penny

Like all the books in this particular series for young people, you get much more that just a simple story about an individual. With this one the young reader is exposed to much more than the simple story we learned fifty years ago, most of it not true, and is given a very good insight to just how it was at that time in our nations history. This work is very well researched, very well written and the illustrations fit the text quite well. As another reviewer has pointed out, in addition to learning the life of a very important individual, the young reader is taught how to study history, what source documents are and what is important and what is not. I cannot recommend this one high enough.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone who wants their children to have a great book that tells the real history. There are a lot of great sources used for the book, all listed in the back, and lots of great details about Pocahontas, her people, and the founding of Jamestown. There are far too many books out there for children about Pocahontas that are horribly inaccurate, but this is not one of them.

Having said all that there are two minor issues with the book: 1. In the book it says that Pocahontas's father inherited the Powhatan Chiefdom from his father, which is not true as Powhatan society was matrilineal - passed through the mother's line- meaning that he inherited from his mother or someone in her family and 2. it oversimplifies the relationship and thoughts of the English about the Powhatan Indians when it mentions the English settled Jamestown Island because they thought it was uninhabited (it was, but was still used for hunting ground). Still, I can overlook these two errors/oversimplifications because the rest of the book is so well written, factual, and has great sources that are all listed for further research.