Review by Booklist Review
Using art as a lens through which to examine history, Rosen gives readers an expansive tour of the history of civilization. Beginning with Aboriginal paintings including one by a contemporary Aboriginal artist in Australia Rosen skips around the globe, presenting artifacts from a wide variety of places at pivotal moments in history. For instance, the ingenious walled city of Great Zimbabwe in the fourteenth century, or the surge of avant-garde art in Russia in the 1920s. Each four-page chapter offers snippets of information about political, religious, or cultural touchstones that affected a region's art, as well as reproductions and collages composed of colored pencil cityscapes and photo elements. The broad scope of the cultures and locations is impressive: in addition to western civilization, Rosen surveys Cahokia, Ankor Wat, Timbuktu, and the Haida people of the Pacific Northwest coastal region, among others. Some of the reproductions are a bit too small to be useful, and the chapters never delve too deeply into each subject, but there's plenty here to pique the curiosity of young readers and inspire further research elsewhere.--Hunter, Sarah Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by School Library Journal Review
Gr 4 Up-This sweeping overview of world cultures, as revealed through art, spans continents and ages, from prehistory to the present. With such a broad range, it is by necessity a sampling of many great civilizations, with two to four pages devoted to each major development. Aboriginal cave paintings in what is currently Australia; the architecture and sculpture of ancient Rome; woodblock prints from the floating world of Edo, Japan; and postrevolution murals in Mexico City are just a few stops on the journey. Readers can compare the Renaissance of 1500 Florence with the book arts flourishing in the trade city of Timbuktu in West Africa during the same time period. These comparisons give perspective on commonalities and variations through time. The expansive text is brought to life with maps, illustrations, and photographs. The illustrator's colorful sketches of vistas emblematic of various cultures are interspersed with photographic examples of the art. The overall impression is one of the bounty of the imagination and industry. This title is a refreshing departure from Eurocentric volumes on art history. Readers will come away with a wider grasp on the history of humanity. VERDICT Recommended for libraries seeking to broaden the scope and variety of their art history collections.-Suzanne LaPierre, Fairfax County Public Library, VA © Copyright 2018. 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
A world tour featuring select highlights of human culture, from 37,000-year-old rock paintings to modern murals and architecture.Title notwithstanding, after a visit to the prehistoric petroglyphs at Nawarla Gabarnmung in northern Australia (and with a 19th-century stop at Haida Gwaii for a gander at Pacific Northwest Native woodcarving), Rosen focuses more on cities or large settlements and urban ways of life through the ages than on specific works or styles of art. His itinerary is determinedly "global," though, covering every continent but Antarctica from 13th-century B.C.E. Thebes to art and architecture created for the 2016 Rio Olympics. Each stop along the way opens with an overview of the site and its distinctive character accompanied by a wide-angle picture painted by Dalzell and dotted with tiny clipped photos of statues or other figures. On the following spread further concise observations on customs and culture accompany three or four smaller (sometimes, alas, minuscule) photos of significant monuments, artifacts, or paintings with explanatory notes. Though the author hustles readers past the Rosetta Stone and Leonardo's Vitruvian Man without benefit of visuals, a satiric Egyptian papyrus offers an eye-opening treat--and in more recent times he boosts the presence of women among his sparse tally of artists by, for instance, pairing works of Judith Leyster and Rembrandt, Mary Cassatt with Claude Monet.Misleadingly titled but broader in scope and less Eurocentric than standard surveys. (glossary, index) (Nonfiction. 11-14)
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