Review by Booklist Review
Page spreads in elegantly muted shades studded with tiny cartoon silhouettes, in landscapes that range from mountains to cities to battlefields, bring to life this abstract time line of a significant chunk of human history. Each giant, double-page spread offers a paragraph broadly describing an event, a historical epoch, or an entire century. Miniscule captions twisting and curving around illustrations provide more nuggets of information, such as Joan of Arc's age when she led the French to victory, the reason the Great Wall was constructed, or the shot credited with opening WWI. Some of these tiny images provide a wealth of added detail, though sometimes without explanation, such as the one dark face among the scene of Bostonians confronting the redcoats (perhaps an homage to Crispus Attucks). A careful browser would need to have a little familiarity with each period presented in order to catch all the details, but this artful overview of history, with the line itself expanding and bulging to make room for all the intricate images, makes an excellent support for more traditional texts.--Goldsmith, Francisca Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
An inky swath of black bisects this gorgeous oversize volume, its shape transforming to create prehistoric seas, ancient monuments, and more as Goes creates a visual time line of life on Earth, augmented by concise captions and relevant historical detail. Beginning with the Big Bang, Goes covers mass extinctions, the rise and fall of empires, wars, and pop culture trends, conveyed with playful details and masterly use of negative space (the great Wall of China winds its way through an overview of China's Ming Dynasty, while arrows radiate out from Nazi Germany in a WWII spread to demonstrate Hitler's impact). As the time line concludes with events including the Fukushima nuclear disaster and Charlie Hebdo shooting ("peace and prosperity for all remains a distant dream"), readers will be left with a powerful sense of how far we have come and how far we have to go. Ages 10-up. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
Gr 3-5-This large-format book examines the history of the world, starting with the big bang and continuing to the 2010s. Each spread covers a different time period, with renderings of the culturally or geologically significant aspects and a short paragraph of text. Exploration, including space, is also covered. Notes abound throughout the illustrations, explaining different facets and interjecting interesting facts. There is a Eurocentric focus, especially once more modern history is reviewed. The color palette is muted, and the cartoonlike illustrations are full of detail that will keep readers interested. VERDICT While the vast scope of this book makes it unsuitable for research use, it is the ideal text for reluctant readers, who will likely find tidbits that will spark curiosity and further investigation.-Ellen Norton, Naperville Public Library, Naperville, IL © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Carried along on a broad ribbon of time that winds across oversized spreads, thousands of small images re-enact the human story. Goes, a Belgian illustrator, begins with the Big Bang, but by the fifth spread, Lucy is peeking from behind a tree as Neanderthals stroll through a torch-lit cave. From there, each page turn offers a panoramic view of a whole civilization up through the Middle Ages, a single century from the 14th to the 19th, decades or half-decades post-World War I, and finally a glimpse of the "2010s" that ends with the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Now and then such diversions as "The Aztecs" or "Space travel" offer pauses in the march. The book is highly selective with both the hordes of stylized but recognizable artifacts and historical figures and the buckets of specific facts and dates scattered throughout. Still, the artist resorts to such extremes of compression that Native American cultures are largely distilled to a cluster of teepees around a totem pole near some buffalo, and one crowd listens to both Jimi Hendrix and "black religious leader" Martin Luther King Jr. while watching JFK motor and singing anti-war songs. It's an ingenious use of spacebut with few exceptions, the world beyond Europe and North America barely figures. The absence of an index makes this a browsing item rather than a resource. A handsome overview, parochial for all its chronological scope. (Nonfiction. 9-12) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
