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Title: How People First Lived by William Jaspersohn, Anthony Accardo ISBN: 0-531-10031-6 Publisher: Granite Impex Ltd Pub. Date: 01 October, 1985 Format: Hardcover List Price(USD): $2.98

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Average Customer Rating: 2 (1 review)

Rating: 2
Summary: Lost opportunity?
Comment: I very much wanted to like this book. It attempted to do what few other children's picture books would even contemplate: to introduce major themes in history to very young children: the origins of early technology, the invention of writing, religion and so on. Unfortunately the prose is stilted and the narrative uneven. It postdates the mastery of fire by about 400,000 years. Worst of all, one illustration after another depicts well-muscled men doing things, while only a few feature any women at all, and then only to show them recoiling with children on their arms. One does not have to be a revisionist feminist to point out that in the vast majority of subsistence economies, present and past, women have played an active role, and at times even a preponderant role, in cultivating, gathering and transporting foodstuffs. The same goes for religion, whether we consider the female shamans of East Asia or the mother cults of the Mediterranean. I also think its time for children's authors to stop portraying "human history" in a simple European/Mediterranean trajectory that begins with the Neanderthals, dips temporarily into ancient Egypt and Sumeria, and resurfaces with Greeks, Romans and Goths, etc. Having taken a very early interest in prehistory myself, I can say from personal experience that it took me many years to overcome the idea that the only ancient history that really mattered was the one which directly influenced later events in Europe.

In short, this book deserves to be out of print.