Review
The beauty of this book is the storytelling approach to history. Foster begins with the day the key person was born and traces goings-on around the world throughout his lifetime. Foster makes the connections between people and events all around the globe that are usually lacking in textbooks. --Cathy Duffy Reviews
An excellent book for children. The illustrations bring history to life and the writing is enthralling not a dry stuffy textbook. Foster explains not just about the Roman world, but the entire world during the time of Augustus Caesar s life. If you don t want your child to hate history, this is a great book to use. --Squeaky Clean Reviews
All of her novels take a horizontal approach to history and address many facets of period life, including politics, culture, scientific discoveries, art, literature, and medicine. The style represented a drastic change from previous written history, which was presented sequentially with little correlation with events elsewhere in the world. The stories are full of questions about every conceivable aspect of the period, thus widening horizons on many different levels, and the books are vividly illustrated with carefully researched maps and charts that capture the imaginations of young readers. Foster's writing style is clear, concise, and fluid and her story lines very easy to follow. Her great strength as a storyteller is her ability to bring her readers right into the minds and times of her characters. --Children's Books and Their Creators by Anita Silvey
About the Author
Genevieve Foster began her career as a commercial artist, illustrator, and advertiser. In the late 1930s it occurred to Foster to write about history in a "horizontal" versus "vertical" fashion, i.e., that national histories should not be taught in isolation from one another. She said that the way history was traditionally taught was "about as dull and unsatisfying, as a play might be, if only one character appeared upon the stage, while the others faintly mumbled their lines in the wings, out of sight of the audience."
She was at the forefront of this new method of historical writing, which viewed history as a cross section of intertwined events and looked at a person in their worldwide historical context. In her books, she integrated global historical events into the telling of a person's life. Her purpose was to make historical figures "alive for children". During her career she wrote 19 nonfiction children's books. Foster traveled extensively and most of her books were translated into 12 15 languages and were distributed by the U.S. State Department.
Foster wrote, nearly fifty years ago, that "nothing is more critical, I believe, than that children growing up in these critical explosive days should be given an understanding of American history as a part of the history of the world. Every year this grows more urgent, as increasingly rapid communication integrates world events more closely and the impact of foreign affairs on our own lives becomes more serious and immediate." Her prescient words resonate with perhaps more truth today and her books continue to broaden the perspectives of her readers.
