Dragons: A Beautifully Illustrated Quest for the World's Great Dragon Myths

This book on Dragons is definitely "a beautifully illustrated quest for the world's greatest dragon myths," as the subtitle claims. Jonathan Evans touches on dragon stories from nearly every culture in the world, and includes summaries of some of the most famous in the greater Europe/Asia are. The book is quite lovely, with heavy paper and at least one picture on every page. Many well-known and historical works of art featuring dragons are reproduced within this volume. There are even two fold out pages, to showcase larger works. Essentially, this book would fall equally under the categories of art history and the history of literature as they intersect under the topic of dragons. Perhaps less of a thorough art history, as the focus is on the stories people have told about dragons in the ancient Near East, Europe, and East Asia. Evans does mention similar monsters present in the myths of the Americas, but does not actually include any of them in this book. There are also less recountings of Chinese and Japanese dragon stories than there are European myths. Evans is mostly interested in the idea of dragons being vanquished than images of the dragon as mostly benevolent water spirits. For being interested primarily in this theme of dragon slaying, Evans actually puts more emphasis on the prevalence and popularity of such creatures in myths around the world than the stories themselves, and as such they are mostly rendered in summary form. As an introduction to the topic, this work on Dragons is excellent, but as a children's story book it would be miss-sorted. I would recommend it to any dragon or fantasy enthusiast, or somebody interested in dragons as a literary theme. This is especially true as the further reading section has a lot of scholarly works to peruse, but none by way of seeking out fiction or picture books covering dragons.