World Wars and the Modern Age

May 1, 2005
Gr 5-8 -King attempts to cover, in one thin volume, what is perhaps the greatest era of change in U.S. history, from the invention of the telephone to V-J Day. More than 75 primary sources have been collected to provide first-person insight into a wide range of people and events from 1876 to 1945, roughly grouped by chronologically arranged topics. This averages out to only about one entry per year and the result is an unfocused, hit-or-miss collection of paragraphs tied together by textbook-dull contextual passages and small, often poorly reproduced, black-and-white illustrations. The entries are mainly short excerpts from larger pieces and include parts of Andrew Carnegie's writings on wealth, an Edward R. Murrow broadcast, an FDR fireside chat, a Langston Hughes poem, a congressional address by Lindbergh, and an eyewitness account of the attack on Pearl Harbor. It's important to note that some spelling and grammar has been modernized from the original texts, which is an unfortunate editorial choice as it negates the authenticity of the voices. Some vocabulary and background information on the relevant topics is printed in the margins. Overall, there's not enough meat on any one topic or theme to warrant purchase for anything other than the most general use." -Andrew Medlar, Chicago Public Library, IL"

Copyright 2005 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2005
Gr. 5-8. Perhaps no era in human history saw so much change as 1870-1950; with those years came the advent of the telephone, electricity, sound recording, movies, radio, TV, and cars. This no-nonsense book stitches together a variety of primary sources with a plainspoken narrative. The primary pieces--letters, diary entries, newspaper accounts, magazine articles--are rarely more than a page long, and each has a genuine whiff of reality: a personal letter about the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, a suffragist writing in 1915, Edward R. Murrow's broadcast from London October 10, 1940. The personal views are bolstered by introductory text and sidebars. While this is a competently done, useful addition to the American Heritage, American Voices series, the use of world wars in the title is too limiting, since this goes beyond the scopes of those events. Illustrated with black-and-white photographs and historical material.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)