The First Americans

This year my elder daughter's history textbook is an eleven volume series called A History of US. Like The Story of the World series, it adds some life and character to the dull old facts and figures of your old fashioned history texts. What's even better is that I get to read it along with the Sonlight curriculum, which offers its own rebuttals to various statements in the text. Not that one really needs the extra commentary. Ms. Hakim does a rather nice job of pointing out that there are two sides to every history. Take this volume, for example. As you might infer from the title, the book talks about the native American population that preceded and encountered Columbus and his followers. Now when I was growing up, Native Americans show more were pretty much just supporting characters in my history texts. Some twenty years later, the pendulum had swung the other way, and they were the sublime innocents who were invaded by the rapacious white fortune hunters. In The First Americans, Ms. Hakim briefly covers the American civilizations that the Europeans found, pointing out their glories and their warts. Likewise, Columbus and the boys are presented as brave, idealistic, cruel and greedy. In A History of US, nobody's perfect... but we are rather interesting.
--J. show less

Thousands of years ago--way before Christopher Columbus set sail--wandering tribes of hunters made their way from Asia across the Bering land bridge to North America. They didn't know it, but they had discovered a New World. "The First Americans" is a fascinating re-creation of pre-Columbian Native American life, and it's an adventure of a lifetime! Hunt seals with the Inuit; harvest corn on a cliff-top mesa; hunt the mighty buffalo; and set sail with Leif Erickson, Columbus, and all the early great explorers--Cabot, Balboa, Ponce de Leon, Cortes, Henry the Navigator, and more--in this brilliantly told story of America before it was America.

I liked it as a read along with my daughter during our home schooling days but we never finished.

This author does great work. Also recommended for adults requiring a review.

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