The Biography of Vanilla

This book is excellent. It has beautiful visuals that are well organized. It covers history, lands, colonies, slavery, growing, the vanilla bean, etc. One gains a great sense of vanilla history and its impact on different cultures. Reading level is at least junior high (lower if you have an advanced student). Students may need a guidarama or graphic organizer help to help them comprehend the text which is jammed with interesting and salient ideas. I had a troubled student work on this and he made a map of vanilla lands, a vanilla timeline, and vanilla ice cream from organic beans. He loved this book so much that he later requested a project on the Biography of Bananas (which ....alas, is it turned out was not such a great book). Despite my burn from Biography of Bananas, I liked this book so much , I will definately check out others in the series.