Presidents

I ordered this book to read myself and then give to my six-year-old grandson. I had just finished watching the John Adams series on DVD and it prompted me to want to read more about past presidents. I showed this book to my grandson when it arrived and he immediately wanted to sit down and have me read it to him. It is full of interesting facts. Also, the poster in the back of the book will be great for him to put on his wall when he is studying history in school. With all the visuals, this is a great book to get youngsters interested in history. I highly recommend it.

I especially like this as a quick review of the presidents. My daughter got this book as a gift for her 7th birthday although I had actually read it to her once before when she was 6. Even her sister listened to me read it when she was around 4 or 5. This book makes it easy to get your kids interested in the presidents with its concise captions and short synopses of each president. For example, my daughters really like the part about Teddy Roosevelt having teddy bears created in his honor, looking at George Washington's false teeth, and trying to recognize the presidents on our currency.

I got really excited for a moment when I say that this DK Eyewitness Book on the "Presidents" was written by James Barber, because I thought this would be James David Barber, the reknown Presidential scholar. Instead it turns out to be James G. Barber, who does a nice job of bringing out the details for all of the Presidents from Washington to Clinton. The book talks about Clinton's impeachment but does not get as far as the 2000 election (the year the book was published). My expectation was that this book would look at the office as well as the men, but the organizational structure is a strictly chronology. Young readers get a sense for the relative importance of each President whether or not they get a "chapter" to themself and if they get just one or a pair of two-page spreads. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt all get four page spreads (and they are the ones on our coins). Theodore Roosevelts gets three pages with William Howard Taft getting the four in the "chapter," which makes perfect sense once you know their history. Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and Bill Clinton all get two pages apiece, which shows an understandable bias towards the Presidents of our lifetime. The format, as everyone who has enjoyed these DK Eyewitness books knows, is to provide a two page spread that is divided into a couple of paragraphs of text along with multiple illustrations on each page with detailed captions (these books set the standard for providing informative captions). For example, the spread on Ronald Reagan has one paragraph of text talking about his main achievements in office and another on the facing page talking about the "Challenger" shuttle disaster. The dominant illustrations are a painting of Reagan that appeared on the cover of "Time" and a space shuttle taking off, but there is also photos of a Reagan-Bush belt buckle for the 1984 campaign, Reagan and his chimp co-star from "Bedtime for Bonzo," a picture of the assassination attempt, Reagan with Mikhail Gorbachev, Oliver North testifying, and Nancy Reagan and her "Just say no to drugs" campaign. A information block identies his term in office, birth information, age at innaguration, First Lady, and children (blocks for other presidents list key events in their presidency as well as information about when and where they died).The results are a series of brief introductions to the various presidents in which the illustrations underscore the highlights of each administration and the things that made them unique (e.g., FDR's dog Fala). Actually, for those who have read more standard juvenile biographies of various presidents this book will probably be more interesting because the pictures it provides get beyond the standard photographs to personal and political artifacts. For example, you will see lots of campaign posters, pins, and o

I'm a teacher who used this book during our class coverage of Election 2000. This book really helped the kids understand more about the Presidents of the past and what they did during their terms to make life in America better. I would recommend it to anyone wanting to know more about our Presidents.

Wow! What an awesome resource for facts about our presidents. Kids will delight in discovering interesting and obscure facts about presidents in all the little sidebars! A super resource guide or a perfect book for browsing through and re-browsing through again and again!