The winner of the first John Newbery Medal, originally published in 1921. "The Story of Mankind" sweeps from the origins of human life to contemporary times. This version has incorporated recent events through the end of the 20th century. Drawings and maps.

Colonialist, sexist, incomplete, but I did learn something about history from van Loon. ( )

This is a bit of a monster of children's book to delve into, especially as the first Newbery winner. (It posed as a hard blockade to overcome when I tried to read the Newberies as a child.) Given the subject material, I consider this written decently. There's nothing too heavy, so a child could climb this mountain if they did it in small bits. And maps are always fun. There are certainly better, more thorough ways to learn history, but this isn't an awful summary for what it is. (The author clearly states he's ignoring Asia, and that is important history that requires another book.)
I did find it a mite frustrating when the topics I did want to know more about were only a few pages long. A lot of subjects are simplified or glided over. In the copy I read, I also found the “updates” to make the history hit the 1980s very sloppy. In one chapter, it’s “The Great War” and in the next, it’s “World War I”. I expected a smoother read as it bounced between authors. The updaters (two, in my case) left the book on sour note. ( )

RG-3

A while back I was reading some Xkcd and became intrigued by a quote that goes as follows:
"HIGH Up in the North in the land called Svithjod, there stands a rock. It is a hundred miles high and a hundred miles wide. Once every thousand years a little bird comes to this rock to sharpen its beak.
When the rock has thus been worn away, then a single day of eternity will have gone by."
I thought it was really poetic and decided to find the book to which it belonged. I was successful in doing so and have now completed the book in a day or so.

First off, this book is a bit below my level of reading. Secondly, it was written in 1922 and the version I found was not updated. Thus there are a number of things, small things, that the author got wrong. Most of these are tolerable since it was written for children during a time in which racism was acceptable. Thirdly, it skims over most of our history. This too is acceptable since a lot of the stuff we know about ancient races has to be conjecture due to the fact that few historical works are extant. Finally, this book is very Eurocentric. In his defense he states that most of the history of the world was done where history was written, but I don't really think that is a comfort to the people inhabiting China, Japan, Korea, India, and countries in Africa...

Of course, with such a wide subject matter as the history of the whole human race, some sacrifices have to be made or the book could span thousands of pages and dozens of volumes. So this book is good in terms of what it is supposed to be; a primer on history for children. It isn't fantastically amazing, but it is apparent that the author has a love of history and is trying to instill that in the reader.

PS: Most of the time I slogged through it by pretending it was narrated by the late Leonard Nimoy of Star Trek fame, but that is neither here nor there. ( )