Around the World in a Hundred Years: From Henry the Navigator to Magellan

As a Christian myself, I'm rather surprised by the reviews claiming this book is full of Christian-bashing. The Christian church at this point in history *did* censor new scientific findings (ie. the earth *does* go around the sun and not the other way around, as the Church used to preach). It's important to realize that Christians haven't always been on the right side of history, since Christians are human and therefore prone to making mistakes. Overall, I found this book to be an easy-to-read, well-done overview of major European explorers. I liked that each explorer got his own chapter, which makes it easy to use as a reference book for studying this time period as a whole. The text is engaging and the illustrations are appealing, which are wonderful assets for a children's history book.

This is the first popular book I have seen on the Age of Exploration that lets the reader in on important details that have been evaluated honestly in scholarly works for decades, but which our more traditional popularizers have tended to gloss over in favor of the notion that the Europeans who led the continent's conquest of the world were all both unstoppable and righteous. (See John H. Perry's "Establishment of the European Hegemony, 1415-1715" (HarperCollins, 1961) for a good example of a more scholarly work that also includes all the warts in its accounts of the famous Age.)It's a lively, easy-to-read book, and it does a good job of telling both the heroic and the not-so-heroic aspects of the story. Well done.

This book is so full of information on the age of exploration, you'll be wondering why it was so hidden from you before. The book is wonderful, fun and so interesting. I can't wait to share it with my students.

I only recently discovered Jean Fritz, and with each of her books that my daughter and I read together, I continue to be more and more impressed with her writing skills. She has the ability to bring history and historical figures to life and look at events with a fresh perspective. Around the World in a Hundred Years tells the stories of how Europeans came to discover some of the less well known parts of the earth. Maybe it's because Ms. Fritz grew up in China, but she has a sensitivity to non-western points of view, and is able to address these events from the point of view of the 'discoverees' as well as the 'discoverers'. More importantly, she is able to help the reader make those critical connections between events that helps bring make them understandable. I highly recommend this book!

This is an excellent book for presenting succinct, engaging accounts of European explorers. We used this book to start our study of the exploration of the New World. The social context of each explorer, and brief biographical information, help the reader to understand the motivations that drove the adventures. The author has gently included the negative impacts European explorers inflicted on the New World natives. This book, and any single chapter, make great "jumping off places" for further in depth study.