North America – Book Review

Book Review
North America: A Fold-Out Graphic History
Written by Sarah Albee
Illustrated by William Exley
Published October 1, 2019

Mom's Review
North America lives up to the high expectations we have for publications from What on Earth? Books. It is as named: a fold-out history of the continent. Spanning from spear throwers in 11,000 BC to the 2019 Indigenous Women's Congress in the US, Albee and Exley give a broad overview of North America by identifying specific events, people, and developments of interest. Readers can see that the Vikings came to Greenland around the same time that chocolate drinking spread from the Maya to the Anasazi (in the southern US region).

You could jump around, move chronologically, or pick a certain span of years to read about. I particularly like how I get an understanding of what was happening all over the continent at the same time. T likes picking out certain pictures of interest and having me read to him about them (we travel forward and backward in time this way). The construction of the book is brilliant and simple. You can spread it out, getting a bird's eye view of our shared history or you can flip the pages like a normal book and narrow your view to just a few hundred years – we have done both.

North America is an excellent sketch of the continent's history and a good starting point for further reading. You won't learn all about Indian Residential Schools, for example, but you will learn enough that you might feel inspired to seek out more reading material. this leads to my next point: the painful and shameful parts of history are not sugarcoated (though they are age-appropriate). Slavery, residential schools, and "European Invaders" are all called what they are. North America does not read like history books from my childhood: it is interesting and honest.

Son's Review
(Age: 4)
Best part:
Folding out the timeline. Picking what you read.
Most interesting fact:
That artist [Frida Kahlo].
(We had just read about her in another book, so he was excited to recognize her.)
On the book vs. the timeline:
I like reading it like a book. I like the timeline.

Why we chose this book:
T has been increasingly interested in the WoEB timeline books over the past year (see other reviews with the "timeline book" label). When the opportunity arose to review this most recent publication, and we saw that it was created in conjunction with the Smithsonian, how could we resist? A review copy was provided in exchange for an honest review.